Sunday, August 12, 2007

If you really want to meet your neighbors...

...request a power outage from your local power company.

Our lights went out at 7:45 p.m. this evening. By 8:00, we knew the names of six neighbors I've never laid eyes upon before in my life. The minute the cool came to a stop in our neighborhood, the floodgates opened and out poured the people into the streets...recluses and all. You could, ahem, recognize the folks that don't seem to get out much.

So what else to do but to take a walk around our comfort zone and see if anyone knew why the power went off in the first place. Everyone had a theory, but most of them pointed to some mysterious downed lines behind a house a few streets over from ours. ("Will those LIONS get us?" Mickey wanted to know. "They should take them back to the zoo...") Anyway, we had many estimates of a lights-on time thrown at us, from a few minutes to a few hours (!!!).

Luckily, by the time we finished our walk and called several friends to see if we could descend upon their (efficiently cooling) homes, the power was back on and all was right with the world once again.

And all the neighbors retreated back to the safety of their homes until the next outage when they're forced to socialize once again. Nice to meet ya!

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