Powerless picnic

OK, moving right along to the first day of the month. Friday, July 1st. It truly was a strange day. I temporarily forgot to feed the cats on my way to school in the morning. Then I got to school and we had to do work in groups in my Spanish class and instead of pairing up with people beside us like we normally do, the teacher paired us herself and put this guy from across the room with me. His name is Trey, and he's one of the few people in my Spanish class that is actually interesting to me. He seems smart enough and knows his Spanish relatively well, but he's no overachiever or anything. So, he missed a day of class and thus I got to explain to him how to do the particular grammar related thing we were doing. He seemed to like this arrangement and took to it well and caught on rather quickly, so that I think he actually did well on the quiz we had afterwards. Anyway, I like explaining thing to people assuming that they want to learn and are not just being idiotic and lazy, so that worked out well for both of us. But after class I went to the gym (as I've been doing) and I hadn't been there ten minutes when this girl running on one of the treadmills just falls out and lands on the hard floor at the end of her machine. She was out for more than a few minutes and there were plenty of people trying to help her and calling for help, but it was a little unsettling. I think she was OK in the end because they got her awake and talking, but Grady Hospital is literally right behind the gym and it took at least 15 minutes for the paramedics to come. I didn't understand why it took so long, I could have easily walked there and back twice in the time it took them to get there. So, I continued working out but stopped a little early because all the drama made me uneasy. Then I get home and Dad and Jon leave to go to a lake for the evening. That is fine by me because I had lots of movies and went upstairs and started watching one of them, but halfway through the movie I hear some serious thunder. After that it's not too long before the lightning starts flashing outside the window, and then before I have a chance to even look out it is pouring down rain and the power goes out. I sat dejectedly looking out the window until Craig called to tell me he was down in Florida and then I got to pass the time with him as it rained and hailed heavily for about 35 minutes. After the rain ended there was debris on the street and in the yard and the road was flooded again, but I was able to go out and head towards the grocery to deposit a check that Dad told me I had to put in for him that day. So, there were at least two trees down on Ponce, and that meant I got stuck in traffic and the traffic lights were out and it was crazy. When I got to the grocery I realized that the power was out there too, and they were running on emergency generators. I deposited the check and decided to walk around the store to pick up a few things in case my dinner plan was thwarted by the power outage at my house. It was so weird, the only other time I was in the grocery with the lights out was when Craig and I were shopping after work one time when a storm hit and the power suddenly went out in the grocery. The generators kicked on in seconds and we had light again, but I remember those moments in the dark when I was startled and thought I had lost Craig somehow, as though he would be able to run away in complete darkness. And he teased me for that later, but I remember the way he immediately reached for me in the dark as though he thought we might not have been able to find each other if the emergency lights hadn't come back so fast. Anyway, Friday afternoon the power had already been out for an hour there, so they were covering up and taking away the meat so that no one could buy it, it was all eerie.

So, in keeping with the weirdness of the day, the power at the house was out from 4:30 in the afternoon to 9:15 at night. Georgia Power originally claimed they would have it fixed faster than that, but that's how long it took. I had shrimp in the refrigerator that I needed to cook, so once I got home I stood there for a long time planning exactly what I would eat and trying to make a mental list of everything I needed to pull out of the fridge as fast as possible in hopes that the rest of the stuff inside would not go bad before the power came back on. It was kind of a funny procedure, I was in a big hurry, and people probably would have laughed if they had seen me, but it worked in the end, I got out the things I needed without letting all the cold air out and spoiling the food inside. I made shrimp wrapped in prochuttio and pancetta because I was trying to use up both and meatballs stuffed with mozzarella. To cook anything I had to light the gas stove with a lighter and I had candles around the kitchen because it started getting dark in there right at 6pm. I didn't have any recipes to follow either, so I used an interesting method for shelling and deveining the shrimp and the cooking those an the meatballs in a satisfactory way. The candlelight cooking left much to be desired, I like to see my food, not peer at it in the dark. And as it turned out, there was still natural light coming into the house via the skylight over the stairwell. In fact, the stairs were lit up like Christmas, it was so bright over there. So, I took my food, climbed the stairs, and had my very own private picnic on the landing. It wasn't ideal, but it worked, and at least the food was good. The house was hot without the AC running and I had no interest in trying to wash my dishes in the dark, so I went and listened to my ipod until the power came back after 9.