Little Power Outage & Tagging Lambs

I came home from work last Monday night to no power in our house. Sigh. I called the neighbors, but they had power. So I called the power company. While I waited for the power company technicians to come out, I stared at Hazel over the kerosene lamp we lit on the kitchen counter.
Side note: If you move to the country, buy kerosene lamps for this occasion! There is a reason they are so effective and widely used. They actually give off a bit of heat and a surprising amount of light! Flashlights are fine, but somehow the lamp is actually friendlier. 
Anyway, as we sat there and she colored with markers, I told myself, "If pioneer women could make dinner without electricity, why the heck can't I?" Duh. So I lit my gas stove with the matches I had literally purchased at the grocery store 2 hours before (how is that for irony?) and made egg rolls by lamplight.

Hazel took it all fairly well, although understandably was a little jumpy. 

Here is what my kitchen looked like when I turned the flash off on my camera:

We got the power back on at 8 pm, it turns out the transformer on our street they replaced a month ago threw the neutral connector. So it was sending surges of power through our lines and it blew every surge protector in the house (boy did they do their job!!). It also blew our furnace until it could be fixed the next day, our garage door opener, my iron, and my clock radio. Ryan's clock radio was just fine, go figure. But all is well again, and the power company will help pay for the stuff that was destroyed. It's just stuff, after all!


On farm-related subjects, we tagged lambs this weekend. I don't have any pictures of this process because both of us had our hands full of wriggling lambs!

After 3 years of raising sheep, we finally decided we should be a "real farm" and ear tag our lambs. And keep records! It's amazing! And pretty sad it took us this long, but this is a perfect example of the sort of thing that native farm kids would just do and know how to do. Instead, this farm has us! So it took two of us about two hours to tag about a dozen lambs. We'll get better at it in the future!