It was a dark and stormy night, and day….

Wow! That was one heck of a storm that passed through here. In our neighborhood, debris was everywhere, trees and fences blew down and, as you might have guessed, power went out. We were sent back to the 19th Century for almost 24 hours. The kids kept busy shuttling up and down the street to play with their various friends (we had six kids having a Nerf shootout in our living room for an hour or so), and Mr. Bookworm and I, huddled under mountains of blankets, read a lot. When daylight ended, I assembled a cold meal and we played charades by candle light until the kids’ bedtime. Then, my husband and I struggled to read for a while more with little flashlights until we gave up, around 9:30 and went to bed. It was a very good reminder (not that I needed one) of how blessed we are to live in the modern era. I do think that few of us appreciate what extraordinary control we exert over our environment — light and dark, heat and cold, they’re all ours to command at the touch of a button. It’s only when the button breaks down that you realize that Nature has been hovering over your shoulder all along and that, ultimately, she has the last word.

Anyway, I’m going to spend the day playing catch-up with work and chores that I couldn’t do yesterday, and definitely with some reading. Indeed, it may not be such a bad thing to have had an information-blackout for 24 hours after Iowa, because it will give me a chance to see things after the dust has settled a bit. I do know that the often prescient Richard Baehr is very depressed about Iowa’s outcome vis a vis, not Huck, but Obama, believing it will catapult the latter into the White House. I hope he’s wrong. I can’t believe that, in time of war and economic insecurity, the American people would be foolish enough to elect as President someone with absolutely no experience at anything beyond academics (more than useless), state legislature (almost useless), and one term in the U.S. Senate (equally almost useless). Still, in the last 100 years alone, the American people elected Warren Harding and Jimmy Carter, so they are prone to aberrant behavior.