The other night when my kid was sick and the power was out, I dutifully passed out flashlights to all my youngins because - if you can believe it - this was the first power outage that they had ever experienced, and they didn't know how to react. We didn't have a whole lot of candles in the house, so I brought out some lights for the kids to play with and we made some shadow puppets.
Back in my day, a power outage was a relatively normal thing, and we would play board games and otherwise find alternate means of family entertainment that didn't include the TV. It's shameful, but my kids seem lost without that daggone TV. It also puts into perspective all the folks in the news paper that bitch to the power company when the lights go down for a few hours, as if they could magically control falling trees and thunderstorms.
As for the flashlights, I only gave LED lights to my kids as I didn't want them sleeping with a device that would burn them. My LED light collection has not exceeded my incandescent light collection, so one child got the Streamlight TLR-1 off my 1911. The runtime on these lights last only an hour or two, or so I thought, but the next afternoon when I got home from work my wife told me that when she picked the lights up out of the kids beds in the morning, they were all still working. Coooool.
It's comforting knowing that they won't just up and die after a short while (the flashlights; not my kids!) and will continue to put out some usable light. My old Surefire incandescents would lose power suddenly, and you had to have either a spare battery, a spare light, or a lighter or you were hosed. New flashlight technology is good stuff, and I'm really appreciating the newer companies like Fenix that offer high performance and quality at a lesser price.
5 comments:
Agreed. We had a power outage here a few weeks back that lasted about 5 hours. I was damn glad to have a couple of Streamlight's on me.
I suppose I could've used one of my TLR-1's as well if need be.
I like my Surefire Kroma. Red or blue LEDs at two levels of intensity, and a large sized white LED, also at two levels. When the full power white is on, it's bright, and gets warm. But when the battery goes low, you still have white light at the lower intensity.
I do like how they gradually die, unlike the C-cell plastic flashlights of the 80s that you could get while in line at K-Mart for $.55. Those thingies went from full power to nothing in less than a minute.
I keep a few glow sticks around too for power outages.
I never thought about glow sticks. Good one!
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