There’s a story about a woman who goes to her Rabbi for advice on how to resolve the breakdown in her relationship with her husband. His advice was “to light Shabbat candles”.
(One of the rituals associated with the Jewish Shabbat or Sabbath is the lighting of candles. This is performed every Friday evening and is normally done by the woman of the house as Judaism sees her as the source and bringer of light.)
This woman saw herself as a ‘modern’ woman with no need of these “archaic rituals”. She clearly became very angry with the Rabbi and left.
A few years later she returned, telling him the following; “as you could tell I was very upset with your response to my request for help addressing my marital issues. I was at my wits end, my relationship with my husband was falling apart and your only suggestion was “to light Shabbat candles”. Since that visit I’ve spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on marriage guidance and counselling. Out of all that time and money the best piece of advice I received was “once a week have a candlelit dinner with your husband”.
Danita and I are NOT having marital problems. However, this week we were forced to have candlelit dinners.
Last time we were at the farm (one of our regular house-sits) I wrote about how the rains didn’t come. This time they came with a vengeance.
As we were driving to the farm we could see lots of lightning and very dark skies. By the time we arrived the storm had passed but it left a trail of destruction in its wake. Trees were down, the road was covered in water and we arrived at the farm to find the power out and the pergola at a very strange angle – see photo. (We found out later from one of the neighbours that there had been an inch of rain in under an hour – that’s a lot of rain. Another neighbour told us lightning had struck 100 metres from their house.)
The farm house is two stories and we use an upstairs bedroom. This was so hot it was impossible to sleep there so we took the cushions from the couches and made a bed on the floor in the lounge room. We actually had one of the best night’s sleep we’ve had for a while although we were kept awake for a while by the gale-force winds.
The electricity supply company has an emergency number and when you ring it you’re asked to enter your postcode and you then receive updates on any issues in your area. We rang this regularly (starting at 6pm) and received the following information.
They were aware of an issue in the area and had not identified the cause but expected power to be restored by 9pm. The expected time then moved to 11pm, 5am, 3pm, 9pm. Clearly this was the following day and we’d given up ringing for updates. Finally, power came back on at 5.30am – 36 hours after going out.
While being without electricity does make for romantic dinners, it also creates other ‘interesting’ effects. Find out more in the next instalment of Adventures of an Urban Nomad.