Where were you when the lights went out?

Me, I was driving up Rainier Avenue.

It’s always a bit freaky to be walking or driving underneath a streetlight just as it decides to go out.   (Did I cause that?)    For years, I used to clap twice after that would happen (it happened at least once a week to me, I swear), claiming that it was a “psychic clap-on/clap-off light”.   The light would go off because I was about to clap.  Prove that it wasn’t!

Anyway…

The weird feeling of a streetlight gong off is nothing quite like driving through an intersection and the lights suddenly going off for blocks in every direction.  (Shit!   Did I cause that?)   That’s what happened last night, at around 11:30 pm, on Rainier near 23rd.   Bright flash and then dark.   Then about a block further, another flash as everything came back on, and then immediately off again, and then a couple more repeats of that in the next few seconds.   It started to look like a scene from a horror film.

Another half mile along and the power was on in that neighborhood, although when I cam back down Rainier an hour later, the power was still off in the zone I had been driving through.   I assume it’s back on this morning.  I don’t see anything on the Seattle Times website today, so I assume it was nothing big enough to mention.   No semi plowing into a transformer station to destroy a time-traveling killer robot or anything.<