A girl walks into a wall...

...and says, "Hey, where's my flashlight?"

Yeah, pretty lame as far as jokes go, isn't it? I got a second wind last night and stayed up late. After the rain yesterday, the winds kicked up and were really howling. The power stuttered and came back on...and then it went out. We've lived here for 6 years, and I'm pretty familiar with the terrain, so I felt my way back to the bedroom to get the flashlight I keep by my side of the bed. I had no problem getting to the bedroom, but I miscalculated when it came to the jog in the wall where the closet is, and WHAM! Face first into the wall. I broke the impact with my forehead, though. Ha! It's a good thing I'm hard-headed. It's sore when I touch it, but I didn't get a knot or anything.

I got my flashlight and used the land line phone to call the power company. Other people had already reported the outage, and it turns out that there were only about a thousand of us due to some downed power lines in the area. I sat out in the dining room while I finished my beverage and in the faint glow coming from the direction of the town, I watched the tree branches sway and listened to the winds blow. It was actually kind of neat and only a tiny bit spooky (and spooky in a good way). Sometimes when Mother Nature wallops me up side the head with a fierce thunderstorm, or intense lightning, or high winds like last night--or sometimes something as pleasant as a perfect summer day--I am in awe and so grateful for what we have here. It really is our little slice of heaven on earth, and I'm very happy that we have the privilege of taking care of it for a while.

Anyhoo, the power was off and on a couple of times last night, and came on for good around 10:30, in plenty of time for football! My Colts won in a meaningless game (sorry, Joyce!) and Ken's Bears lost in a game that could have gotten them into the playoffs.

One of the things we discovered in the room cleanup last night was a DVD of "The Village," a sort of spooky movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan. We thought we'd watched it some time ago, but neither of us remembered it at all.

Warning: Here there be spoilers!

Even though we hadn't seen it, it was obvious to both of us pretty quickly that this wasn't set in the past, and that the village in question was actually an enclave protected and removed from modern society. I suppose the big "wow" moment was supposed to be when the blind girl finds her way to civilization, but since we'd already figured it out early on, it was more like an "oh, big surprise" moment.

End of spoilers

I didn't hate this movie, and William Hurt and Joaquin Phoenix are always great, but I found it sort of blah. I guess I'm just jaded when it comes to scary movies, because I didn't find this one all that scary, or even especially suspenseful. It started verrrrry sloooooow, but picked up a little ways in, enough so that we were intrigued. But all in all, nothing overly exciting. When it comes to spooky villages, I'll take "Village of the Damned" any ol' day!