Note: WiFi issues are impacting our paragraph spacing today.
Yesterday’s storm didn’t arrive with drama so much as persistence. It simply stayed and deepened, hour by hour, until it wrapped itself around the house and refused to let go. By late morning, the wind had grown bold enough to shake the walls, rattling windows with sudden gusts that made us pause mid-sentence and listen. Outside, the sheep that usually dot the pasture had quietly vanished. The sky never lightened. It remained a heavy, bruised gray, as though the sun had given up trying.
We were hunkered down safely indoors, grateful for the solid walls around us, when just before noon, the inevitable happened. The power went out. At first, it was just a click and a silence, no hum, no background noise, but the implications came rushing in quickly. Without power, the electric pump that moves water from the outdoor Jojo tanks doesn’t work. No pump means no flushing toilet. There’s no swimming pool here to bail water from, either. That realization alone was enough to make us groan out loud.
Immediately, we were transported back to Barcelona, to that unforgettable five-day stretch without a working toilet. What a disaster that was, the kind of experience that permanently rewires your appreciation for plumbing. Standing there in New Zealand, wind howling outside, it felt uncomfortably familiar.
As we mentally ran through our options, more complications surfaced. The stove here is entirely electric. No power meant no cooking. There’s no grill, either, so dinner suddenly became a much bigger question than we’d anticipated. Then the WiFi dropped instantly, cutting off any hope of streaming shows to distract ourselves. We still had some battery power on our laptops, but without internet, they were reduced to little more than glowing rectangles. Within a few hours, our phones began draining quickly as we played games to keep boredom at bay.
We searched the house for old-school entertainment, playing cards, books, puzzles, anything, but came up empty-handed. It was just us, the storm, and dwindling battery percentages. Our biggest immediate concern became dinner. Neither of us wanted to venture out to dinner in the worsening weather, with flooding a real possibility and the wind still whipping relentlessly.
After taking stock of what we had on hand that didn’t require cooking or heating, we landed on a plan. Tom’s leftover pork roast would work, and I could make a batch of tuna salad, minus the usual boiled eggs. Not ideal, but perfectly fine. It was one of those meals born of necessity rather than inspiration, and we were grateful it was even an option.
With darkness falling around 8:30 pm here, we decided we’d go to bed early, entertaining ourselves with whatever charge remained on our phones. We have a fully charged portable battery pack, but it charges painfully slowly, so we treated it like a precious resource. I sent Dave a message to see if he had any insight into when the power might return. In the meantime, using my phone and our T-Mobile account, with a very weak signal, I managed to check the power company’s website. They were aware of the outage here, along with seven others nearby. That knowledge helped, even if it didn’t speed things up.
Then, at about 4:00 pm, the lights flickered back on. Relief washed over us instantly. Power, water, and connectivity were all restored in one quiet moment. Today, the rain has stopped, though the winds remain strong. We’re hopeful we’ll make it through the day and evening without another outage, but we’ll see.
Of course, this whole experience reminded us of the frequent power outages, referred to as load shedding, we endured in Marloth Park, South Africa, before Danie installed the inverter system. Once we had that, outages became almost irrelevant. The only thing we couldn’t use was the oven; the burners were gas, so life went on fairly normally.
We’re sincerely grateful for the return of power and the simple comforts it provides. With it back on, we’re once again able to enjoy yet another pleasant day in New Zealand, winds and all.
Be well.
Photo from ten years ago today, December 30, 2015:
