A gas stove-top lit with a lighter and a whistling kettle meant a cuppa was still possible during a lengthy power outage when a windstorm hit.
Photo by
Bree Harding
I had just spent two days resenting that some appliances in my house ran on gas after paying a $700 bill for it that only covered two months.
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Perspective and changing it, especially when forced to, is as educational as hindsight, don’t you think?
I woke at 3am to no power as cyclonic winds lashed the exterior of my house.
There was clanging and banging, the sound of glass shattering in the distance, an unsettling constant howl in the air, pings from my phone as messages from my abruptly-woken kids questioned me as though I was some kind of all-knowing weather god.
“What is going on?” they said. “Will school still be on?”
My eldest, who is quite the weather app enthusiast, sent me screenshots delivering the news of the undesirable prediction that wind would persist the entire day.
The Wi-Fi was out and, from the comfort and safety of my own bed, I couldn’t see any damage or hazards on my cameras.
I grabbed a torch from my bedside table and steeled myself to head outdoors to batten down what hatches I could in between the furious squalls.
A fire in my fire pit had reignited with the wild gusts of air, giving new, lively, glowing life to the darkened, dying embers I’d long left.
An outdoor beanbag, 10m from where its heavy mass typically stays grounded, had blown over and settled dangerously close to the fire in a scene that may have looked tragically different had it landed a metre to the left.
We didn’t sleep much between then and 6.45am when the alarm on my still-plugged-in, yet dying, phone sounded.
I hadn’t ventured out the front of my house earlier and had forgotten it was bin night. My recycle bin’s lid had flung open in the violent gale, obviously before the truck had emptied it, and my cardboard packaging littered the street.
There were bins blown over all around the neighbourhood. Some had blown over before they’d been emptied and rubbish littered the streets.
Photo by
Bree Harding
I traipsed down the street in my pyjamas to chase it as it danced, almost mockingly, eluding my attempts to capture it.
At this point, I was grateful my water was heated by gas. I thought I’ll happily pay that $700 next time if I could still have a hot shower after being whipped viciously by a chilly and untamed wind.
Of course, I don’t have a gas-powered hairdryer, so without stepping back into the whiplashing conditions outdoors for an alternate hasty drying solution, I had to sit and let my hair drip dry, trying to work from my kitchen table. At the same time, my laptop battery’s strength grew agonisingly weaker and the hot-spotting chewed through a ghastly amount of extra data charges.
My makeshift office at the kitchen table.
Photo by
Bree Harding
There was no power at the office either, thus this predicament.
Even if they were, I’d forgotten how to open my garage door manually and couldn’t find its instructions.
The last lengthy power outage in my area was at Christmas time, and by some rare coincidence, my ute was on the more convenient side of the garage door.
Not this time. And unless something mechanical failed in the past few weeks, the likelihood of me remembering the solution was minimal. My brain doesn’t retain that brand of information.
When the laptop eventually died, I propped my phone in a viewing cradle and connected an almost full-size QWERTY keyboard to it via Bluetooth to type yarns into my Notes app. A portable charger was charging my phone.
I boiled a camp kettle on my gas stove-top — which I’d lit with a gas lighter because the electric igniter wasn’t functioning — and enjoyed a hot chocolate for morning tea.
I couldn’t have worked at all if it weren’t for technology, such as power banks and roaming data.
It was a doozy of a windstorm that took out our power and interrupted our routine.
Photo by
Bree Harding
But other things would have been trickier if it weren’t for old-school methods and tools like whistling kettles and pull cords on garage doors (irrelevant, I guess, when I still can’t work it out anyway).
We rely on power and technology in almost every aspect of our lives, every day.
It’s helpful and we’re spoilt, but boy do our First World lifestyles take a hit when they fail.
But there’s something exciting about having to make do and rack your brain for alternative ways to do things.
Likewise, when you’ve exhausted all avenues, there’s also something quite pleasant about being forced to just stop and reflect.
I reflected so much that I spewed almost 800 words on to a page about it.
Let’s call that a therapeutic exercise in gratitude.
And now, I wish you all light, too — spiritually and quite literally.
8°C