When the power goes out...

"What's that?  Why did the fan stop, Daddy?"

"It's a brown out, the power went out."

"What do we do?"

"Sit very still, do nothing and wait. Movement only creates heat and makes you hot."

We experienced our second brown out since moving to Manila.  This was somewhat expected as there was an incident in a nearby province and the news warned that rolling brown outs might happen as a result.  The temperature was 95 degrees with humidity at 60%.  With numbers like that you can imagine what we looked like. 

So what was the first thing we did?  Try to get as cool as possible.  We took cold showers and rejoiced with glee as the icy water poured over our heads. (Noah's "rejoicing" sounded similar to screams of agony, but he enjoyed the result.)  Then we sat on the couch and fanned ourselves.  Here's a picture of my personal fan, a little two handed action by a cute energetic 4 year old.

I tucked in a "lapin" (Tagalog for cloth diaper, which is used to tuck in the back of one's shirt to soak up the excess sweat) in my collar, a bandana on my freshly showered head and pulled out the fan I keep in my purse.

Meanwhile, as Jakob and I were cooling ourselves with hand fans, Allan was busy making homemade mosquito traps out of empty plastic coke bottles.  "Here little mosquito, here little mosquito, take a little dip in our bottle?" [NOTE: as of the writing of this post we have yet to "catch" our first mosquito.]

As the time passed and the power wasn't coming back on, I decided I better cook up the ground pork that was thawing in the fridge so it wouldn't go bad.  Thankfully we have gas stove tops.

As I was cooking up the pork Allan checked traffic and altered his plans for the afternoon, since with the power outage Manila traffic was heavier than usual.  It took our friend 1 hour to travel part of the road that would normally take about 5 minutes.  Then we gathered up our batteries and candles, to have them ready.

As time ticked by Allan and I talked about plots to sci-fi movies and we decided that if the power went out worldwide, that it would be our neighbors down the street and in other third world countries who would most likely rise to power since they already know how to live without reliance on electricity.  And just as the plot to our sci-fi movie just started to get interesting the power came back on and Trevor woke up from his nap and wandered downstairs.  He missed the whole thing.