The night the lights went out in Georgia . . .

Well, well, we had one heck of a storm last night! It came up out of nowhere! Kind of scary sitting around at 6:30, sun is out and within 20 minutes, it's dark as night, wind is howling so loud you can hear it in the house! I stepped out on my front porch to check out what all the commotion was and I couldn't believe how hard the wind was blowing and it was high up in the tops of the trees, not down on the ground.

I couldn't turn on the local news cast, I have a satelite dish and the storm had disrupted my signal, so I turned on the weather radio and they said a severe thunder storm was brewing with high winds and lightning!

I went back outside and saw one of my elderly neighbors mowing his lawn, he just got out of the hospital! I literally ran down the street and told him that he needed to get inside, I know his daughter would have a stroke if she knew he was working in that yard let alone in the middle of a severe storm! I tried to get him to let me put his mower away because he doesn't move fast and he wouldn't have any part of that! By the time I got back in my house the power had gone out!

Where am I going with all of this you ask? Well, during the two hours that our neighborhood was without power, I started thinking, which is always dangerous on my part!

The rain had stopped and the houses were dark and people started coming outside, talking to their neighbors! I observed this phenomenon and thought with all the technology that keeps us tied to the inside of our homes, we never even notice our next door neighbors for the most part. I have a tendency to notice mine because I grew up out in the country and it's part of who I am. We also have lots of elderly people who live on my street that I check in on occasionally but for the most part, we don't know who lives down the street let alone right next door to us.

Over the two hours we were without power and since the internet was down, I'd go inside and do some laundry! Well that was pretty dumb, no electricity, no washing clothes, so I'd just clean up my kitchen! Well it was dark and there wasn't enough outside light to do much in there! We did have water because we are on City water, no pump required! I couldn't run the vacuum, no electricity! OK, then I'll sit down and read, again, not enough light to read without electricity. I didn't want to waste my battery in my BlackBerry talking on the phone because I was unsure of how long we would be without power but I did send a couple of text messages.

The most serious dilemma that I had was Heidi, my female schnauzer. She has been diagnosed with chronic heart failure and has to be kept cool or her heart races and she starts panting, ninety to nothing! I had immediately opened some windows since the temperature outside had dropped almost twenty-five degrees in a matter of about thirty minutes but that didn't seem to be keeping her cool. I just kept telling myself, think, just think and it occurred to me that I could put her in the bath tub and shower her with cool water. I picked her up and took her to the bathroom, ran some pretty mild temperature water and didn't completely dry her off and stuck her up in a window behind my couch and she fell asleep and stayed cool for the duration.

Having said all of that, it dawned on me, how many people are resourceful enough to survive and improvise when they really need to? The fact was obvious that we are slaves to electricity, but I wondered, if Americans ever really needed to sacrifice and survive in times of a more severe disaster, do they have the mental acuity or the intestinal fortitude to dig down deep and fend for themselves or would they wait on a first responder team to attend to their supposed needs?

I want to state for the record, I did not have an emergency preparedness kit handy, I did have most of the things needed but they weren't in a nice, tidy backpack, I had to scrounge around for most of the things and install batteries. Unlike my friend who is a Democrat! I did use my phone to call her and she told me how proud I would be of her, she was cooking hot dogs on her emergency grill that was in her "emergency" preparedness kit! In an emergency, we are all just people trying to survive.

I thought about the elderly who live on my street and what their needs might be! I wondered if they had cordless phones that were electronic and may not have another source to call 911. I wondered if people knew that they should keep their refrigerators and their freezers closed until the power came back on.

I did call Georgia Power to alert them along with the approximately 150,000 other people that I'm sure that they also heard from that our power was out! At that point they said it would be 10:15 p.m. before the power was restored, but they performed a miracle and the power was restored by 9:15 p.m.

The most amazing thing that I noticed was the silence. We never realize how much noise electricity coursing through a home, a neighborhood or a city makes, but when the power was off, it was so quiet. The only sounds I could hear were the emergency vehicles in the neighborhood responding to emergencies, the huge power trucks that were rumbling through the streets and after thirty minutes or so, the buzz of chain saws in the distance. That's when I realized that we were all going to be O.K. and that life as we knew it would also be restored.

Are you prepared for a natural disaster or any type of disaster? Needless to say, I bought a ton of batteries today in hopes of creating an "emergency preparedness kit." Don't forget your pets!

All of this gave me some serious food for thought, in many different directions, the night the lights went out in Georgia.