This evening the local power company bestowed a power outage on Hesse Seewald.  So we made the best of it by lighting a fire in the fireplace for both warmth and light in the room. We also collected all of the candles and candle sticks in the house and lit them in parts of the house. The warm glow of candlelight ( supplied by about 20 candles) produced a low, but peaceful light and made me think about life in the 18th Century when all homes needed fireplaces and candlelight at night.

There is one downside to this scenario: Our thermostats are electric powered so when the power goes out, so does the thermostat and thus the furnace shuts down. The solution is to huddle in the family room where the fireplace is, closing all of the doors into the room, and let the fireplace keep all the heat in the room.