Powerless

The power went out an hour ago. It blinked, twitched, came on again for a split second (just enough to make the charging cell phones squawk), and then took a leave of absence, time of return not specified. So now we're powerless. At this moment, I still have 73% battery power, rapidly diminishing, and, of course, no internet.

Being without power is kind of amusing for a little while. I always have to think carefully about what I can and cannot do without electricity. Fortunately, my tea maker was done doing its thing, so I had a pot of hot tea available, and everyone was finished having breakfast, so no need for eating untoasted toast (which would, of course, have been a terrible experience).

But I had to consider how to keep my tea hot. Usually, I just leave the pot sitting on the counter, and zap a cup of the lukewarm brew in the microwave when I'm in need of caffeinated refreshment (which, as a rule, is about once every fifteen minutes, until the pot runs dry). Well, zappage capacities vanish with the departure of power. So, some other means of keeping the tea toasty had to be found.

At first I pulled out a tea cosy. I've got a couple of them; one of them I knitted out of ugly thick brown wool, and it goes quite charmingly around my White Betty teapot (is there such a thing - a White Betty? It's shaped just like a Brown Betty, but it's white porcelain.). The brown wool works very well to hide those hideous tea dribbles that always run off the spout and disfigure any other self-respecting tea cosy, which is why I chose that particular yarn. However, that particular cosy won't fit over the glass carafe that goes with the tea maker (which is, technically, a coffee maker, but woe betide the hapless innocent who dares put the bean grind into my brew machine! There's nothing worse than tea made in a coffee maker. Blch - cofftea. Coffee flavour is horrifically penetrant, sort of like peanut butter in hot-drink format. Tea is a delicate thing, easily bullied by the heftier brew. No coffee in my tea maker, got that?). So: brown woolly cosy, tea maker carafe, no fit. Then, I took out the thick quilted pink floral thing I got for a present a while back; it ties around the top. It worked, sort of, but it wasn't entirely satisfactory.

But then I went "D'uh!" The piece of equipment that is designed for this very purpose, the item I wanted here, is the Stövchen. It's an East Frisian tea-keeper-warmer. You see that candle in the bottom? That's why that kind of candle is called a tea light.

So, I fished the Stövchen off the top of the microwave where it usually resides, lit the candle, parked the tea pot on top, and was ready for a prolonged bout of powerlessness.

However, seeing as you're reading this on the internet just now, you can conclude that the power did, eventually, come back on. My battery was down to 54%, the cell phones let out another strangled squawk, the smoke alarm screeched briefly, and we were back to humming along in our usual electrified way. But it's always kind of fun to think about how you could function without the blessed power of the hydro dam, isn't it? So long as it doesn't last all that long.

Life, the Universe, and Powerlessness. It's good to have a Stövchen in reserve.