A Tale of Resourcefulness and Laziness. Mostly Laziness.

On October 25th, I drove home from school in a terrible storm. I knew even before I reached my apartment that the power was out. I could tell as soon as I pulled into the neighborhood. I mean, usually there isn't a lot of activity in the houses on my block at 10:30pm on Tuesdays, but usually there is some form of life inside the houses. A TV on in the front room. A light on in a back bedroom. Nothing. So dark.

I pulled up to my apartment and arranged the things I would need to get inside. Obviously leaving my porchlight on when I had left for class that afternoon was doing me no good now. However, my go-to back-up light (streetlamp on the corner) was also dark. It was pouring buckets of rain, and I didn't have my umbrella. I had to get creative. I decided that my school bag could survive a night in the car. I doubted anyone would bust my window in an attempt to steal "Foundations of Library and Information Science." So I tucked my small purse under my jacket, right up in my armpit so that it wouldn't slip out onto the sidewalk, grabbed my cell phone in one hand and got my house key ready in the other. I pulled my hands close to my chest and made a mad dash from my car to the front of my apartment. My phone made a dim light so that I could make out the lock and open the door. I actually managed to make it inside before I got too soaked.

Mission #1: Find flashlight.

Not as easy as I thought it would be. Apparently I had used the flashlight for something else recently, and had not put it back in the nightstand where it's supposed to be. I was also unable to locate the flashlight in the utility room, but honestly I didn't look that hard. I finally found the bedroom flashlight on the counter in the kitchen, only to discover that the batteries were dead. Even if I had replacement batteries somewhere in my apartment (which I don't) I wouldn't have been able to find them because I didn't have a working flashlight.

Mission #2: Find candle. And lighter.

Super easy. I had a big jar candle on my dresser, and happened to have left the lighter lying right next to it. So convenient, I can almost over look the fact that I screwed myself over in the flashlight department.

Mission #3: Read.

I realized at this moment that I had a perfect opportunity to read something non-school-related. I've been using every ounce of self-discipline this semester to dedicate every second of reading time to school-related reading. However, I now found myself with a solid hour of uninterrupted reading time with my school books out in the car. I grabbed the book I had read the first third of on the trip home from Georgia the month before: Sex With Kings. It's about royal mistresses throughout history and it's awesome. I was so happy to get some real reading time. Finally my eyes grew tired from reading by the flickering candlelight, so I blew out the candle and went to sleep.

Sometime in the night the power came back on. Apparently at some point before settling down in bed I must have absentmindedly flipped the bedroom light switch, because the room was suddenly flooded with light. I probably could have slept through that, though. What woke me up was my printer suddenly springing to life as loudly as humanly possible. Or I guess that should be "as loudly as machine-ly possible."

Anyway, the reason I tell you this story is this: it is now November 5th, and I have not yet reset any of the clocks in my apartment. I have been solely relying on my cell phone and computer clocks for the last week and a half. Why? Because I knew that the daylight savings time clock change was this weekend, and I didn't want to have to deal with changing my clocks twice in two weeks.

Yep. I'm that lazy.