This afternoon we had the boys wearing their Wellies to go for a walk, so they could walk in the puddles from the morning rain.  They enjoyed stepping in the water; they both were walking and playing gently, so they did not get themselves wet at all.  After being out there for half an hour, suddenly we noticed the Christmas lights at every house were flickering and eventually went out.  We were surprised with the outage as the storm had already passed.  Stuart gathered our flashlights and lantern from the house, and we were all enjoying playing with them in the dark.  Shortly later, we were contemplating ideas for dinner, so Stuart opened the garage door manually to get our car out.  By then, our neighbors just came back from their walk; it turned out that they were locked out of their house and with no keys to their car either.  We invited them inside our house to hang out.  The kids had a good time playing with the train set in front of the fireplace.  Some of them even enjoyed a snack while they played too.

    The neighbors started to contemplate the idea of breaking a window in the garage to get inside their house.  They decided they did not want to be a burden to us too long nor fall behind in their own nighttime routine so they went forth with the plan to break into their own home.  I was joking with them that the power would probably return as soon as they broke the window.  Roughly 30 seconds after Sam and Stuart broke the window, the power came back on.  Funny how my joke came true.

    They thanked us and went home to return their evening routine.  The outage was only slightly over an hour; it turned out to be relatively fun experience for us.