Prepared for an electrical outage? We weren’t either.
We’re a little more resilient now.

We haven’t been keepinig an emergency water supply, 2-months of canned food, a propane heater and cooker, sleeping bags, gold coins, gasoline in jerrycans, or a fishing and trapping handbook. Not even a gun. How unprepared can we get!

That has all changed now. The other evening the electricity went off. Only for an hour or two; a transformer up the street went bonk. We found the matches, with them the candles, with them the flashlights. We walked around the freezing streets exchanging neighborliness and misinformation, then passed the time on our battery-powered laptops.

We were much more vulnerable than I expected. The cordless phones on our landline need juice at the base. Our cellphones were partly discharged. We had no heat, no hot water. Our radio and TV news comes through the entertainment system which was down. Our router-dependent laptops couldn’t reach the internet.

The next day, I went out and bought an Etón Solarlink.

If we’d had it the night before we could have

– found it easily by the window where it solar-charges
– used its light to find candles and flashlights
– listened on AM, FM or 7 NOAA weather bands
– plugged our cell phones into it to charge
– used its speaker to play tunes from our MP3
– hand-cranked it occasionally to keep it charged
– plugged it in to recharge when the power came on
– contributed to the Red Cross through our purchase

It won’t heat the house; I checked the instructions. But it will go a long way to fill our most urgent needs the next time we lose power.

And cranking it should give us something physical to do in the dark, if we can’t think of something better.