Darkness, Darkness Be My Pillow

We were having such a nice dinner. Portabella mushroom in ginger, soy, and hot sesame oil marinade, basmati rice, and homemade red cabbage slaw with homegrown carrots. We were deep in conversation about something, more than three fourths of a bottle of Cabernet already imbibed when the lights suddenly went out. There wasn't even a foreshadowing flicker, just sudden and absolute darkness.

We laughed.

The weather reports had been promising this storm. The winds had been blowing fiercely all afternoon. Big gusts, the kind that keep the ferry from docking in town. White caps chopped the bay. But it all seemed to pass without much fanfare. In fact we had been talking about it at dinner, how the weather reports must have been slightly overblown just to cover their forecasting reputations. The last few storms had kicked Seattle's collective butt. So, everyone needed to be on high alert for this one, according to the news folks who call themselves StormTracker (dramatic flourish here). I had photographed the approaching storm in the afternoon, but quickly the sky behind it had turned a brilliant blue, and everything seemed to melt into a lovely sunset and dinner.

We wondered, while we were eating, if we were really going to have snow in the morning and the freezing temperatures that have been promised for the next few days. We love the cold temps, the icy landscapes, the sensual snow-covered earth. We were hoping we would find such a thing in the morning.

Then the lights went out.

Somewhere the storm was brewing and blowing enough to absolutely isolate us in our warm and cozy abode. We scrambled for our backup systems-- candles, lanterns, flashlights, and ...

Roger went to the big garage and pulled out our brand new 5000 watt generator. We'll be able to post this silly post. We'll watch a movie on our laptop dvd (luckily we had rented "Thank You For Smoking"). We're not going to be utterly marooned. Just quietly and comfortably in the dark, waiting to see if there will be snow in the morning. We promise we'll let you know.

It's dark, but we are online.

The promised update:
Just as we suspected, the weather newsies completely went overboard on this, at least for our side of Puget Sound. We got our power back fairly quickly and there's NO SNOW ON THE GROUND. 7:40 am PST.