It's surprising how often, when the power's failed, that you find yourself walking into a room and flicking on a light switch, expecting something to happen.
And, when nothing happens, how you spend a few moments in something close to disbelief about the situation you've found yourself in.
Friday, at the height of the blizzard, people all over the eastern part of the province (and other parts besides) were left doing exactly that, after the Holyrood generating station went offline, leaving the Northeast Avalon with much less energy than the region normally consumes.
Perhaps worth thinking about as a result of that period without electricity is what will happen in the absence of Holyrood, when all of our electricity will be supplied by long- distance supply line - in part by incredibly long-distance lines bringing Muskrat Falls power from Labrador.
The failure at Holyrood came during a serious winter storm, one with winds gusting at over 100 kilometres an hour and with a heavy snowfall that clearly made it impossible for Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro to effectively mobilize crews to deal with the factors that led to the shutdown.
In the future absence of Holyrood - a major polluter though it may be - it's not clear where emergency supplies of power would come from in this region.
After all, one of the issues raised by Manitoba Hydro International in its analysis of the transmission system from Muskrat Falls was concern about what Nalcor and Newfoundland Hydro had in mind for an emergency plan.
And there is certainly room to spend time considering just that.
One thing that people learned again on Friday is that we have come to depend - and perhaps depend too much - on stable, consistent electrical service and supply. We need it for heat and light and to power our myriad of appliances, devices, computers, phones and conveniences. We need it so much that we can hardly conceive of how to handle being without it.
Perhaps the clearest wakeup call we should take from Friday's outage - an outage that apparently involved the partial failure of the largest generating station on the Avalon - is that as long as we are all going to depend so much on our supply of electricity, we also have to pay as much attention to the future of that supply and the issues that affect it.
A failure the size of Friday's situation at Holyrood is certainly a concern for any generating utility, and bears a full examination to consider what happened, what can be learned from the incident and what it might say about the future stability of our electrical grid.
Utilities measure their failure rates in mere hours - Friday's loss of power marks a reliability issue that can't simply be brushed off as solely a weather event.
We look forward to that examination.
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