On Saturday night, we were performing our pre-bedtime routine at the Cynical Dad household. We were enjoying quiet time: Zoey and Ella were coloring while Zed and I played with blocks. It had been storming for quite some time. Ella looked outside and immediately turned into Chicken Little. "Oh my God," she screamed. "It looks awful out there! Turn on the Weather Channel! I think a tornado's coming!"
I looked outside and things did look bad. Hail. Sideways rain. Lots of lightning. The darkest clouds I had ever seen. I ran into the other room to turn on the television. Just as I got about two feet away from the television, BOOM! No more power.
Ella went into full-blown survival mode. She gathered the kids and ran into the hallway. I called my Mom to learn what the television meteorologists were saying about the storm. "Severe thunderstorm warning. Damaging winds, hail, and lightning." But no tornado.
Since we were not in any immediate danger, I started searching for emergency supplies. I managed to scrounge up two candles and a lighter. Ella took one candle and rocked Zed to sleep while I read Zoey bedtime stories by candlelight.
You know the chestnut about Abraham Lincoln reading by candlelight as a kid? Total bullshit. Cannot be done.
After we put the kids to bed, Ella was not feeling well so she went to bed as well. I started looking for a flashlight. I managed to make it downstairs to the pantry where I found our only flashlight. It didn't work. I opened the flashlight to remove the batteries and felt the cool, refreshing battery acid cover my hand.
While I was washing the battery acid off my hand, I heard a beep. I assumed since we lost power, our security system was malfunctioning. I went to investigate, but that wasn't the problem. I fumbled through the house, trying to locate the source of the annoying beep. I discovered it was coming from the carbon monoxide detector in Zed's room.
I am usually a fairly rational and sane person. But there is a side to my psyche that is insane and irrational and full of negative thoughts. When this side rears its ugly head, it is so powerful that it overwhelms my logical side.
Zed has a carbon monoxide detector that plugs into the wall. It has a battery inside that serves as a backup in case the power goes out. I knew the battery inside the detector was dead and the unit was alerting me to this fact. But my irrational side said, "No. Your house is filling up with carbon monoxide from those two candles. You'll all be dead by dawn."
So I searched the house for any source of light. I found Zoey's working Elmo flashlight, blew out the candles, and headed back to Zed's bedroom. I remembered that miners would take canaries into the shaft with them to warn them of carbon monoxide, so I deduced Zed would be the first affected from the deadly carbon monoxide rapidly filling our house from two tiny candles.
So I lied on the floor next to Zed's crib for the rest of the evening, entertaining myself with Sudoku puzzles and by making shadow puppets on the wall by the light of Zoey's Elmo flashlight. But since this flashlight was made for kids, it would begin to dim after fifteen seconds before finally going dark after forty-five seconds. So I had to constantly press the button to keep the flashlight working.
I think I finally passed out from a mixture of fear and stress at 2:00 AM.
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This post was entered in December's Blogging For Books competition.
Lights Out (Where Our Hero Proves Once Again His Family Would Be Better Off If He Was In A Padded Room Somewhere Far Away)
