Darkness falls

This was our street yesterday:

Let me back up. Yesterday at about 5 a.m. I woke up to a couple of bright flashes of light outside. A second later, the power went out. I peeked out our window (which doesn't look out onto the street), didn't see anything wrong other than the fact that the streetlights were out, and went back to sleep.

What I didn't know was that a semi truck had rolled over a block from our apartment and taken out three telephone poles. The driver was OK, but the crash left some serious damage that took literally almost a day to repair.

When we got home from work, the street was still blocked off, the power was still out and the temperature in our house was about 10,000 degrees. We realized our fridge hadn't been running for twelve hours, so we ran over to the gas station and brought back a couple bags of ice, which we stuffed into our freezer along with as much perishable food as we could fit.

With every reason to leave the house we headed up to the temple, where we had an awesome session. When we got back we heard the power was supposed to be turned back on by 10 p.m. But when that time rolled around, the electric company was still stringing wires across the new telephone poles, and we were doing this:

Monopoly Deal!

Yes, that is a candle. Our food was in a literal icebox and our house was illuminated by candlelight. It was like we were living in the 19th Century—except for our cell phones and iTunes, that is.

And it was fun.

But we were sure glad when the power came back on at 1:00 this morning.