Top Performance by a Blackout, Short Form

This award goes to the blackout that hit parts of Norwood Avenue, Ashland Avenue, Bryant Street, Elmwood Avenue and no doubt elsewhere earlier today.
I got home from work at 4:15 p.m., and as I got out of my car, our next-door neighbor, Jim Whitford, musician extraordinaire who is being inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame tonight, and one of our neighbors across the street both came out and said we had just lost power on Norwood near Bryant. I was pissed off, but knowing that so many people have had it worse than us during this freak storm and aftermath, us losing power for the first time Thursday afternoon (we had previously lost and gotten back cable, Internet and telephone service) was not as bad as things could be.
I took Walker Evans for his walk and found out that down Norwood to Summer had also lost power, and Walker seemed to have to check out the neighborhood in greater detail as the rain intensified. Boy, I was looking forward to a night of cold sandwiches, darkness and rain.
After we got back from our neighborhood jaunt, I went back out to Rite Aid, because all of the flashlights I could find had dead D batteries (and no fresh ones in the house), except the unopened radio/flashlight my mother Sheila bought us a few Christmases ago. It took 2 C batteries, which did not come with the flashlight. Rite Aid's battery section was overwhelmingly picked over, with no D batteries and only a few C batteries left. I grabbed a few packages of C batteries and two small, high-powered flashlights that were ridiculously cheap (about $10 for the pair).
Getting home at about 5:30 p.m. and with no news to watch or Internet access to use, I made my lunch for work tomorrow, got things ready otherwise for work, washed the remaining breakfast dishes and, with no passion for a cold dinner, I decided to go ahead and start making our previous dinner plan, Mineo & Sapio chicken sausage, wheat penne pasta and tomato sauce. The overcast light situation was just bright enough that I figured I could get cooking dinner in before it got too dark, which would be about 6:15-20 p.m., the time Val gets home from work.
Cooking dinner went fine except that I underestimated how fast the kitchen would get dark, and had to get one of the new flashlights to help me see if/when the sausage was cooked and how the pasta was doing. Val came home at about 6:20 p.m., after I had started using the flashlight, and we talked about our days at work and so on as I finished making dinner. I had put the pasta on the plates and was pouring tomato sauce onto penne.

Val: Hey, isn't' that the heat coming on?
Kevin: (After a 5-second silent pause) Hey, the lights on the coffee maker are flashing.

So, at 6:45 p.m., the power came back on and Val and I were not pitched into the world of waiting for power to come back on, which Buffalo Pundit and Buffalo Geek have really had more than enough of this week among the many members of the Buffalo Prefecture of the Blogosphere (thanks, Jaquandor).