2. Upon your return, when you find the power is still out, you might struggle with trying to manually open your garage door in the dark. Then a bug might fly up your nose and you will give up and leave the car in the driveway, because potential damage to your car might actually be preferable to having a bug up your nose. One quandary here: leave the car under a tree (protection from hail) or NOT under a tree (protection from falling tree limbs)? Flip a coin!
3. You'll call the power company and be informed by their automated system that your power will be restored in two hours. You'll pass some time sitting in the dark, waiting for the next round of storms. But your husband will not play Scrabble by candlelight with you, because you were too consistently ruthless with this game early in your courtship, and he does not enjoy it anymore. Are you satisfied? You have ruined Scrabble for the person you love most in this world.
4. The next morning, when you wake up and still have no power, you'll call the power company again. "Two hours," the mechanical voice will tell you. Later, the mechanical voice will turn sadistic and tell you that your power will be restored by Wednesday.
5. You will pack your cooler in a huff, taking care to save the Kramarczuk's sausages that your dad had bought, intending to grill them at your house that day. You will instead move the party to your mother-in-law's, where, despite the fact that you are actually so so fortunate to HAVE somewhere to go (let alone the fact that it's a beautiful, spacious, well-appointed home), you will still feel a little sad and displaced. You will wear a dress, because all of your jeans were in the washer when the power went out.
6. You'll return to your house on Sunday to clean out your refrigerators. Both of them, you spoiled brat. Goodbye, kosher chicken breasts. Goodbye, Costco burger patties that you were always uneasy about anyway. You will keep your various mustards, though, because mustards are largely vinegar and therefore, let's assume, impervious to spoilage. (If this isn't true, please keep to yourself, because mustard!)
7. Monday, while you're at work, your husband will check his Slingbox on his phone. If the Slingbox is working, the power must be on at home. The Slingbox is WORKING. GLORY GLORY.
8. You'll go home and put things back together. All of the clocks need resetting, and Carson the Roomba appears to have gone on a drunken spree for some reason, having lost his dustbin in the kitchen but having still continued on, far away, into the guest bedroom, sweeping the dust but not collecting it (which is really the key thing), because for that he would need the dustbin, which, as we've established, was jettisoned in the kitchen.
9. Outside, things will largely be quite all right, which you'll be very glad for, considering there are some house and cars in Minneapolis with trees resting on them at the moment. One casualty, though, will be the deck planter. After you'd seen the previous owner's pot filler early in the spring, you'd added to the system with whatever bulky recyclables you had on hand. This was all over Pinterest too; you figured it couldn't go wrong.
Turns out if the pot gets waterlogged enough, it can go very wrong. But you are lucky that this and some chicken breasts made up the total of your losses.
10. You then enjoy your air conditioning and your ice water and try to forget that this will most likely happen again someday, but worse. You will focus on devising a new pot filler solution, i.e., a problem you can solve. The end.
