As if the Floods Weren't Enough....

As if the floods weren't enough to cause mayhem and confusion in Laie, Mother Nature decided to send a total power outage for the entire island! It happened all of a sudden at 6:45 PM on December 26th just as we were leaving a lovely garden wedding reception. It's a good thing our friends had candles around the reception area! It was very eerie to drive home and look around and see pitch black everywhere. There were only a few lights in buildings with generators. We felt so bad for these friends who were having the reception for their daughter. They had been flooded out of their house 10 days before, had relatives and the inlaws coming and needed to find housing for them, and then ended up with no power for the remainder of their wedding reception. We found out later that no one came to the reception once the power went off. They had tons of food left. I am sure it was heartbreaking! It will take a few years to look back at the situation and laugh--or maybe they never will laugh!

As we were driving home, we thought of the temple and wondered what they were doing. The temple has been just jammed every night for the last week. Because the temple is closing for major repairs and refurbishing for 18 months, all the faithful want to be sure to get there one more time. I worked in the morning of the 26th and was so busy. It was great! Well, it turns out that they continued with the 7 PM session becuase the generator could provide enough power. It was split into two sessions. The 8 PM session went ahead as scheduled but they could only take people who were new endowments and their families. They had to turn away a lot of people.

So, what do you do when the lights go out???? You do puzzles by candlelight, of course!! (And play games)

Anyway, that is what we did. Over the course of the holiday, we have put together 4 puzzles. We just finished the last one last night. We did two 500 piece puzzles, a 300 piece and a 100 piece. They were all gifts for Christmas. Greg gave me three puzzles in different sizes for Christmas. They were all Native American pictures. Then we received a puzzle of Mt. Fuji (Fuji-san) from Yuko, Greg's secretary at Mazda. That's the one we finished last night. Here it is in the early stages. It was the toughest one of all! The pieces all looked so similar it was very hard to distinguish the difference!
Twenty Hours without Power can make you a little stir crazy. When we woke up the next morning and realized that we were still without power, we found our little AM/FM radio in our 72 hour kit and turned it on to see what was happening in the rest of the island. This was the first we realized that the whole island had been blacked out! We discovered in the late morning that Honolulu had power restored and that Kaneohe would soon have power. So we got in the car and headed for town. We went to Costco to get Greg a hotdog and then went to Kaneohe to a movie. By the time we got out of the movie, the power had been restored in Laie. So we returned home. I later got the scoop of what happened at the temple on the last day it would be open. Because the temple had weddings and new endowments scheduled, they went ahead and did them using the generator power and lots of battery powered lights in the locker rooms and the sealing rooms. I am sure it created a memorable experience for all who attended. The last patron walked out the front door as the lights came on. Amazing!

And on that note, we say a fond farewell to the temple in Laie as we know it. When the temple opens in 18 months, it will be very different on the inside. With the temple closing, our friends, the Workmans, will be leaving to go back to Utah to wait until they can resume their mission as the Temple president and Matron. We will miss them but will see them soon in Utah. We will miss our service in the temple. We always felt so needed there. And we loved performing the ordinances and assisting people as they came for the first time. It was a great experience. We will miss it very much.