I am always amazed that power outages are such a common experience in north America. In more than 55 years here in Europe I have experienced exactly two power outages, one that was planned when they were working in the substation for this street, and one incident that took out a whole part of the city for 20 minutes. The latter one was so extraordinary that it made the national evening news.

I don’t remember when the last one happened. We have like 5 minutes of downtime per year in Germany on average

Hahaha you should see the outage map of Washington State.

What do I like to do? Nothing, I hate power outages.

What I typically do is I have a large stockpile of candles from an old MLM scheme. I light those and play on my phone if there’s Internet. We have multiple battery banks for these occasions.

If there’s no Internet I will read. Both ebooks and regular books because my attention will shift.

I also try to do something productive like study for something.

Most of all I pile like eleventy billion blankets on the bed because I’m so cold. The furry ones are poor space heaters.

When I was a kid we always played games. Like charades or something. My dad would light the camp stove and we’d entertain ourselves for the evening as a family. They were nice.

Contemplate how close to total collapse we are every day

Last outage we had, one of the first things I did was take a hot shower. Our water heater is electric and if it became extended I might not get another chance.