No Lights, No Problem

Romantic dinner for two

Yesterday we had heavy winds, naturally followed by a power blackout at around 1:30pm. Immediately Ariel and the crew at the shop followed our "Blackout Action Plan".
1. Plug in the old un-powered phone. Now we can field calls from customers.
2. Get out the manual sales book and record sales so we can input them into the system later.
3. Get the generator from home and connect it to the main milk fridge and public freezers and computer.
4. Put a pot on the stove and fill with water so we can provide tea and instant coffee, and
5. Light the open fire to get a fully romantic experience.
As the majority of our cooking is gas we could still run the restaurant. The Energy company confidently told us they would get power back by 4:00pm. We found this impressive considering they had not yet discovered the location of the actual fault. This estimate then moved to 5:00pm, 6:30pm and eventually 10:00pm.
Friday night is our restaurant night at the shop and a little power failure wasn't going to stop us or our regular customers. We had candles romantically set up on all the tables, buckets of water in each bathroom for toilet flushing and washing of hands, camping lights in the kitchen and we were in business.  There were a lot of take-away (eat out) orders from customers who only had electric cooking facilities or as one explained it, "I had the meat but it was frozen and we normally use the microwave to thaw it out.  So I told my husband it was either macaroni and cheese or burgers from the shop.  It was not a difficult decision."