Things I never got from Monk or Psych

I am, obviously, one of the lucky ones.

As did many people in the area, we lost our electrical power Thursday night. We were lucky and had power restored in the wee hours Friday morning. Lucky. I can count the blessings of restored power; we didn't lose all the frozen food in the big freezer, had air conditioning for relief from hot and humid, power for the hair dryer meant I didn't have wet hair and power for the coffee maker meant caffeine and on and on.

What we didn't have was cable.

No Monk, no Psych, no local news and weather, no military channels for my husband, no Saturday morning mystery on TCM and no Saturday night movie on one of the premium channels. And no computer hook up to anyone else. No mail. No blog. No checking anything out online. Nada.

We didn't have cable.

So, we pulled out the DVD's and watched old favorites, reliving and remembering why they are old favorites. We walked around the house with a book in one hand, a finger keeping our place while refilling coffee cups and carrying them back to the sofas. We're big readers anyway, but in the past two days we read even more than usual, sharing the best bits with one another, laughing, talking and 'what ifing'. I cleared off the work table downstairs by finishing up a few projects. Actually finishing them. So, now not only do I have a cleared work table and a completed hooked wool rug (a very small one) I can now use, but a sense of accomplishment. I never got that from Monk. And the cleared work table has spurred me to pull out all the new wool I've amassed over years and begin washing and drying it so it will be ready to use when I start the new hooked wool rug. A rug I've been planning for the last six months but never started because I hadn't yet washed the wool. I've never gotten this kind of motivation from Psych. I have enough space on the work table to spread out all the oh-so soft washed and dried wools and begin choosing a color palate. I've cleared off the chalk board over my work table and listed the new chocolate truffle flavors I'm going to begin making and testing this afternoon instead of next week because there is nothing to compare with that sense of accomplishment from the completion of a project. I can do it and I did do it and that is incredible motivation for me.

I've learned some things from two days without cable, things I knew but that had been buried beneath the distraction of absolutely everything being available. The old favorites, be they movies or a DVD collection of a television series, are old favorites because of they way they make us feel, uplifted or inspired or just plain happy. The old favorites are the ones to which we go back again and again. That reading inputs knowledge into a better part of the brain than pictures flashing on the screen. And that a cleared work table now has space for autumn colored wools begging to be touched and sorted and cut into strips and worked into a rug that could be handed down to another who may look at it and remember me long after Monk and Psych go off the air.

Now I'm going to leave my computer, slip a DVD into the player and head off toward my goals with the realization that I am, obviously, one of the lucky ones.