How to make a blackout work for you

Or should I say… it worked out alright for me. Last night (which at the time was the evening of new years day) was one of the longer blackouts we’ve had for a while – power went off around 3:30pm or so, and came on for about 10 seconds at a time for the next 2 hours… I think we got another half-hour of power around 6:30, which charged the phone system here for a Sunday phone call (Sunday all day is the only ISD off-peak call-rates day – meaning you pay nasty rates, but not quite as nasty as usual). Still only managed a 10 minute call before the power cut out entirely again! So there I was, reading by my 2 candles for an hour or two – getting hungry, but I this night I couldn’t be bothered cooking in the dark. Just when I was starting to think “gee – I need to buy more candles”, Alex & Jonika dropped by on the way back from somewhere to invite me over to sit out the blackout. Huzzah!

So there were some batteries in my I-Pod still, and in an I-Pod that A&J had been given for Chrissy… and there was also a little hand-held radio-tuner running on batteries. An I-trip later, and there was party central by candle-light in central Lae on new years night. Heh… was the best dance I’ve had in ages! Not very PNG perhaps, but the i-pods made for a very, very good NY’s day dance.

Oh yeah – and the power came back on sometime inbetween as well.

((Jeremy, them’s a lot of good songs in that i-pod you’ve passed on there! - - Roger, the present was well used!))