By Jon Show — Did anyone else’s family treat last night’s roughly two-hour power outage caused by an accident on West Catawba Avenue like a nuclear fallout? No? Just mine? Awesome.

I found out about the power outage around 7:15 p.m. after I finished playing pickleball at Bailey Road Park and finally found my keys. When I had pulled up to the complex earlier that night, I had to run to Court 10 to make sure Lake Norman Pickleball didn’t usurp the court I’d reserved, and misplaced them in the bed my truck.

When I finally opened my truck and grabbed my phone, I found 38 unread text messages from the previous 90 minutes, many telling me about the accident, but also 11 consecutive texts from the Blonde Bomber in our family chat, all unanswered:

Bro can someone come home.
I’m dying here alone.
Someone is trying to kill me.
The power is out.
And now there’s weird noises.
The powers (sic) out in the whole neighborhood.
My phones (sic) at 2 and the powers (sic) out and if I die I love you guys.
Someone come home.
Now.
Please.
Someone help me.

I’m joking about her texts because she does this almost as a joke. At no time was she dying, no one was trying to kill her and the weird noises were probably from the poor dog who couldn’t figure out why it was bed time when she hadn’t yet eaten dinner.

The Mother of Dragons, who was still at work, finally responded:

I keep trying to call you.
It’s going to vm.
I’m walking out right now.
Grandma tried to stop by and check on you but you didn’t answer your phone.

Future Man, who was unaccounted for and had been told prior to the outage to pick up two sides of white rice from Pho Nam because I can’t cook rice, finally chimed in:

Whoever goes to Pho Nam next give them an extra dollar I was a dollar shortm (sic).

I called home and told my wife where all my camping lanterns were located because she was setting up mood lighting with battery-powered flicker tea lights. Then I called my mom, who pretended to be suffering alone at home in the dark by herself before finally admitting she was at someone’s house having a glass of wine in a fully lit room.

My family had all eaten, and without power, I couldn’t heat up my dinner, so I went to Torrence & Knox for taco night. An hour later, as I was leaving, I received a call from my mother.

Mom: “I’m coming to your house.”
Me: “It’s 9 p.m. I’m going home and going to bed.”
Mom: “I tracked your wife she’s at Harris Teeter I’m going there to see what she’s doing.”

And then she hung up because she has never ended a phone call by saying, “Goodbye.”

Two minutes later, she called me back. Apparently, she didn’t go to Harris Teeter but wanted to tell me there was a detour around the accident. She said she was going to eat dinner at Osaka and again hung up before I could tell her that Osaka also didn’t have power.

Moments later, I pulled into my neighborhood as all the lights turned back on. I entered the driveway, and the Mother of Dragons was following behind me. She and our daughter got out of the car with two gallons of water like we were prepping for a hurricane.

Me: “You’re aware the faucets still work when the power is out, right?”
Wife: “I’m not drinking sink water. It’s gross.”

Our son was unaccounted for at the time. He went to an ice cream shop during the outage, where he purchased a gallon of ice cream, returned home, and was told him he couldn’t open the freezer because we don’t open the fridge during power outages.

No one knows where he went after that.

Now home, I took a shower and got dressed saw that the kids lights were out, so he was home, and they were in bed.

I went downstairs, opened my email and saw a note from the Cornelius Police Department that the person involved in the accident was doing fine, which is the only reason I’m now writing this. I would never joke about a situation when someone was harmed.

Then I opened the freezer to eat some of his ice cream but there was none there.

Did he eat it all? I don’t know. But how do you buy a gallon of ice cream when you’re a dollar short on the $3 rice I asked you to pick up for dinner?