Last night we had a really cool lightning show. There was lightning all around our house, but it was all behind clouds so you couldn’t actually see the lightning, only the sky lighting up in all different directions. At some point in time in the middle of the night, I woke up to a cacophany of beeps. The power was off. One set of beeps was coming from RoboMower, which beeps everytime it’s not fully charged. It was beeping loud enough in the garage that I could hear it in the living room and I wondered if the neighbors couldn’t hear it as well. Unfortunately the garage is so full that without light there was no way I could make it out to the mower to disconnect the battery, and I also couldn’t open the garage door in order to get to it from the front. Oh well, let it beep. Upstairs, my computer’s UPS also began beeping. At first it would beep a couple of times every five minutes, just to let me know the power was out. Later, it started beeping continuously — its SOS had turned into an SOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOSSOS signal.

I briefly thought about looking for a flashlight but in the mornings I usually can’t find my own shoes and belt and I had those just the day before, so the odds of me finding a flashlight were (excuse the pun) dim. Instead I headed to the kitchen table and ran across my PalmPilot. I flipped it on and the bright LCD screen filled the room with blue light. With my PalmPilot as a guide, I was able to make it upstairs and shut down my computer systems. I then set a 6:00am alarm on my Palm to wake me up. I was just about to drift back to sleep when the phone started ringing. It was our home alarm company, calling to check on us and make sure no one had cut out power and tried to attack us — we assured them that it was a simple power outage. By this point I had been up for over an hour, had been to the garage, upstairs, downstairs, and on the phone (all by the light of the PalmPilot), so I decided I might as well get dressed and come to work.