Blackout

So...12:05 today the power suddenly goes off.  You would have thought Justin Bieber was in the building or something.  Suddenly every kids NEEDS, NEEDS, NEEDS to go to the pitch black bathroom to look for the elusive Bloody Mary, every kid NEDS, NEEDS, NEEDS to get a drink from the drinking fountain on the OTHER SIDE OF THE BUILDING (I guess it was darker there or something) and every teacher NEEDS, NEEDS, NEEDS to go home.  One might even think that these kids have never, ever, ever seen the dark before.

The day wasn't so bad though.  However, my room did get quite stuffy about 10 minutes or so right before the power came back on - no power, no air conditioning of course.  The kids ended up by saying screaming BEST DAY EVER (or until field day, or a day that they get candy, or any other day after this).

It reminded me of a time during freshman year of high school.  One extremely windy October day, one that preceded a week of heavy rain, trees fell down all over Bainbridge Island, plunging the entire 17 square mile rock in Puget Sound into a complete no power zone.   Anyways, to get back to my story, my first class of the day was in Ms. Koch's (pronounced Cook you perverts) Spanish class.  Normally, the class would have lasted 50 minutes.  Instead on this blustery day it lasted 2.5 hours.  With a teacher who only spoke in Spanish (who was as un-spanish as Taco Bell, by the way), the captain of the water polo team, and a kid who was in love with Anthrax (the band, not the lethal strain of disease).  They decided that this was the day for La Maestra Koch to pull out her boom box with the mad size D batteries and teach us the song "Chicas De Hoy".  Think the aforementioned  Beibs singing about the women of today in a falsetto voice with catchy be-bops in the background.  The water polo player loved it so much that days after our involuntary captivity/choir practice he could still be heard singing it in the hallway.  That song will haunt me to my death.  And maybe into the hereafter.  But that day did have a silver lining playbook of it's own - half day! We got home and the power outage lasted another two days.  Living in the Northwest, surrounded by trees, a constant cover of rain clouds that routinely let loose, and stuck between not one but two mountain ranges and their natural wind tunnel, one got used to power outages.  Everyone had generators.  Everyone.

Today I was not as lucky.  But, it wasn't that bad.  Now I have writing prompts to last me until the end of the year.  Which, by the way, just happens to be 17 more days.  But who's counting? Maybe this guy.

Until mañana mi amigos,

Shauna