Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Hmm…power has been going up and down this evening. I was sitting at the computer, playing Warcraft, when suddenly the lights went out. The computer, being plugged into a UPS, stayed up (although the router went down) and I thought that perhaps a fuse had blown. Then the little urgent beeping of the UPS told me it was an outage. I peered out the blinds and saw absolute pitch black out there. Hmmmm. Grabbed a lightstick offa the door frame (theres one sitting on the top of the doorways to each room…out of sight, out of mind, and always there when I need it) and popped it. Nothing reinforces a sense of something being wrong than having your immediate surroundings illuminated by a green glowstick. Retrieved a flashlight, retired the lightstick, pulled the cop radio outta the charger and turned it on. It was, apparently, a rather wide outage for this town. I listened for a few moments as I retrieved some matches for the Aladdin lamps but, unsurprisingly, the power came back on at that point. Total downtime? Maybe five minutes. This has been fairly typical of the outages we get. I cannot recall the last time we had a nighttime outage that lasted more than fifteen minutes. The longest outage in the twentyfive years Ive been here has been about eight or nine hours.

So, a nice little exercise in preparedness. I already replaced the used lightstick with a newer one from the stash in the bunker. About the only thing to do differently is to stage a small LED flashlight next to the computer since I spend so much time there.

One interesting note, finding a flashlight in the dark can be an exercise in irony. Many flashlights have glow-in-the-dark features but they require a recent exposure to light in order to stay ‘charged’. Fortunately, there are alternatives. A couple posts from the past about tritium safety markers and tritium ‘keyring’ trasers. Basically, its the same stuff in your night sights, but in a tube and attached to a lanyard ring…attach it to your gear and you can then find your gear in the dark. Buddy of mine sent me this link to an article about it and a source for them. Looks like I’m going to have to pick up a few.