Sometimes the most irritating things unexpectedly occur, causing a cascading series of other untoward events to make for a most annoying type of grudging efforts to attempt restoration of what one can consider normalcy. As, for example, what occurred in this household yesterday.

A week earlier we'd received an automated telephone alert that our local electricity distributor had a planned outage to take place overnight; for a two-hour period in the wee hours of the morning, there would be no electricity. So we were prepared for that, and in fact since it was between the hours of two and four a.m. there was nothing to be interrupted. Some of our clocks, of course, had to be adjusted next morning.

When we awoke yesterday morning we realized when we went downstairs to the kitchen that there had been an overnight power interruption. One of two hours' duration, necessitating that the clocks once again be restored to real time. Eventually I got around to turning on my desktop, only to find there was no Internet connectivity. A glance at the modum showed us that though it was powered on there was no connection; a red light and four blue ones under the green power light. So we made one of those reluctant calls to our Internet service provider.

A technician guided my husband to a few attempts to restore power. Finally, he was instructed to interrupt a few wires leading to the modum and our connection was restored. All well and good, if somewhat frustrating. But I didn't know how frustrating until I had turned to my Outlook email account. It looked transformed. The folders I had kept for years holding items I wanted to retain were missing. And my inbox kept filling up with hundreds of emails. The day's usual incoming emails, yes, but there were also those that had been deleted over the past week or so, and others, many others interspersed among the almost one thousand that had been retained by me in those now-disappeared folders.

It took hours to go through them all, to restore the folders (on a previous occasion when a similar event had occurred this had happened as well, only the Outlook program had 'restored' itself, bringing back the folders, but not this time) and tuck back into them, one by one, the files I planned to keep. A waste of time and a grating annoyance, placing me in a grim mood that tainted much of the morning.

Good thing my husband always has a smile and a hug to spare. As a mood restoration there's nothing like it.