Monday, February 09, 2009

Friday night fun

On Friday evening at about 5:40 I decided that it was finally time for my beard to go. I found the beard trimmer, banged it a few times to get the batteries to make contact, and went to work on the beard removal process. About half-way through the process the power went out. Fortunately it was a battery powered trimmer and was thus able to continue the process with the assistance of a flashlight. The downside was that I wasn't really able to tidy things up at all, so I had to call it quits at a rather rough stage in the beard removal process. One result of the early finish was that I was left with a 'stache, which might otherwise have been removed.

Once the beard removal was finished and a few flashlights and candles had been gathered Neil and I settled into a nice debate about how one should go about taping the fridge shut (to prevent the release of cold air) in such a circumstance. After our rather exhaustive debate we moved over to the card table to play some candlelight cribbage. All this time we could see that even across the street a number of buildings did have power.



After not too long all three of us thought that it might be best if we tried to make our way to a restaurant for dinner, as it wasn't likely that we would be able to cook all that much on the tea lights. As we made our way out discovered that the outage was quite spotty. In some instances certain side of a street would have power, or long building on a block might have power. The downside of this inconsistency was that we had no idea whether the restaurant we hoped to patronize would be open until we reached its front door. As it turned out, the restaurant was closed, so we made our way across town to a restaurant we were pretty sure would be open.

We eventually made it to a restaurant on Quinpool and settled in for a very pleasant dinner. Actually, I think the dinner had the positive benefit of teaching me a lesson about Halifax fish and chips, which is that it does not tend to agree with my system. As we were hanging around after the meal killing time I managed to drop my cup of coffee on the table. Fortunately the napkin I had on my lap managed to soak up most of the liquid. This incident reminded me how important proper napkin placement is.

After a quick stop at a great video rental store near the restaurant we made our way back to our part of town. As we were walking down Spring Garden it became clear that power had still not been fully restored. It was suggested that we might try to a movie to kill some time (the movie theatre was on the side of the street with power). Unfortunately, once we made it to the ticketing area it became apparent that we weren't the only ones with this idea. Even at about 9:30 the place was completely packed and there was no way we would have made it into a movie on time.

Once back at the apartment Neil and I re-lit the candles and played some more cribbage while Rebecca read by candlelight. Eventually, at about 10:45, the power came back on and we were able to get on with our evening as planned, though by this time I really didn't have as much time to devote to reading and school work as I had planned on.

Throughout much of the power outage we were somewhat worried about the status of a can of pop that Rebecca had placed in the freezer just minutes before the outage. As we didn't know how long we would be without power we didn't want to open the freezer to take the can out. Fortunately, even though it had been in the freezer for four hours, the can did not rupture, which would have been quite a mess.

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