Thunderstorm

This morning, the power went out at 1 a.m. I know because the silence woke me up. It was silent inside the house, but very noisy outside the house. More on this later. My husband and I like to sleep in a wind tunnel-like atmosphere with a small portable fan on his side of the bed and then the overhead fan doing 90 mph just as an extra precaution. Not for the air flow so much as for the noise. When it's completely quiet, I can hear ringing in my ears. I'm not sure why that is, but I would never go to the doctor for it anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

The power went out because there was a thunderstorm raging outside. It was quite toasty in the house with no electrically-powered a/c to cool things down, and there was no sleeping with great crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning without all of our fannage to muffle the noise. Sleep eludes one in a hot and uncomfortably noisy atmosphere, I have found.

Justin and I both were awake, waiting for a child or three to show up needing comfort. Instead we got the dog (already not my favorite member of the household - see yesterday's post). She went to Justin's side of the bed first, and I heard him take her jangly collar off. Then she came around to my side and I could feel her chin on the covers as she stared at me intently. I pretended not to notice, but the motion of her wagging tail was coming through her body into her jaw resting on the bed and making the mattress sway slightly. Hard to ignore.

I got the extra blanket off the foot of the bed and spread it out on the floor for her. She promptly circled and got into the doggy equivalent of the comfy position, all curled up with her nose on her hind legs.

Jack, who is normally our go-to worrier, never even showed up. We all compared notes in the morning while getting ready for school and all the kids woke up when the power went out, but managed to go back to sleep by themselves. Jack had been up with us until close to 11:00 p.m., stressed out because at the lunch table earlier that day, the girls in his class said that ghosts were real and if you didn't believe in them, they would come and find you and haunt you until they did. Powerful incentive in Jack's mind. Justin asked him if he was going to believe a bunch of second grade girls or his parents, and I think he was a little bit on the fence, but ultimately he came around to the parental viewpoint. Still, we had to watch Charles Barkley on the David Letterman Show to distract him from ghostly thoughts. Sir Charles did the trick, and Jack trooped back upstairs to bed. Not even a thunderstorm could bother him.