Lights Out, Glow Sticks On

The electricity around these parts can be a little wishy-washy at times.  Take, for example, two months ago when the power went out for eight hours one day because the city was ‘doing some work’… All I saw was a couple guys trimming the bamboo that faces our house (it was so tall that it was running into the power lines).  That took all of 30 minutes.  But the power was out all day long.  We started to worry about our food in the freezer and the fridge, but luckily the electricity came back on in the evening.

But then the next afternoon it goes out.  Again.  And this time, the guard on our street couldn’t tell us a reason for it.  It was just our street.  Not even the neighborhood.  Once darkness fell, we had to get creative and light lots of tea lights and even make a homemade lamp out of a bright flashlight, a white paper cup and some Jenga blocks.  (The high ceilings made out of wood just absorbed all the light when we set the flashlight facing up, so we had to make a shade for it so it would illuminate the space).  It looked something like this:

This time, because our food had half thawed the day before, and we didn’t know how long the lights would be out for, we decided to take all our spoilable food over to a friend’s house to store in their fridge.  Of course, shortly after we got back home, the power went back on.  But it was okay because it made for a memorable evening.

But by far, the best ‘lights out’ experience I’ve ever had in my life was last night. (The only experience that might rival it was when the power went out in junior high and we got the rest of the day off… I actually remember that day so clearly because I got to go home with my good friend Eryn Haines who lived very close to a certain cute boy named Joe Westfall, and we ended up going over to another friend’s house where he was and jumping on a huge trampoline all together… it was pure junior high bliss!) But back to last night.

We were finishing up a lovely dinner and a deep conversation with our friends Amy and Jonathan, the kids were happily playing make-believe… when suddenly we heard the huge BOOM of a transformer blowing close by.  And that was it - the lights were out.

With a cell-phone illuminating the pitch-black room, something routinely annoying as the power going out quickly turned into a moment we won’t soon forget, as Amy ingeniously remembered a box full of glow-sticks and – can you believe it – glow in the dark balloons that she just happened to have.

We then busted out my Ipod, put it on their battery-powered Bose, and turned on Carly Rae Jepson’s CallMe Maybe (which, by the way, they had never heard and was the reason why I had brought the Ipod in the first place… these long-term missionaries, man, they need to be educated on pop culture!).

A crazy, blissful, joy-filled dance party in the dark ensued.  Three kids, four very mature adults, glow sticks waving, illuminated balloons flying, all of us jumping, singing, and dancing.  “Hey I just met you, and this is crazy…”

I didn't bring my nice SLR Nikon, so there was no real way to capture the bliss-in-the-dark moment, but here you get the idea (Jonathan, don't hate me for putting this awesome picture of you up on the blog!)

A tiny flash of the glow stick here...

(Above is a video as the dance party continued to J. Lo's On the Floor... you can hear me, embarrassingly enough, shouting 'on the floor')

It was crazy-fun for sure.  And I just thought to myself, can the lights go out every night so I can have an excuse to dance in the dark with glow sticks to Call Me Maybe?

It doesn’t get much better than this.

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P.S. I just have to add that we introduced my father-in-law to Call Me Maybe when he was here a couple weeks ago and he liked it so much that it was pretty much on constant replay any time we got in the car.  And now, Kate is obsessed with it and every morning on the way to school she asks to hear it and then goes into full American Idol mode – singing the lyrics into a banana or popsicle stick or maraca – whatever we have on hand to act as a microphone.

P.P.S. I also have to agree with our friend Eric who mentioned on Facebook something like "People shouldn't shame people for liking Call Me Maybe".  True.  It may be a cheesy, teeny-bop song, but it makes me happy every time I hear it.  You can't really argue with joy.