Being prepared

We have worked hard as a family to be prepared for emergencies. Food, water, fire drills, etc, etc. This morning we woke up with no power. We had no idea how long it had been off or when it would come back on. So we got ready for the day by candlelight. After about and hour we decided to pull out the generator. It's all the way in the basement and it's heavy. It took two of us to carry it upstairs, then outside. We started it to make sure it was working. Then we had to dig around to find the cord in the garage. Of course it was buried under a bunch of stuff. Then we carried the generator over the mounds of snow, and mud, to the back corner of the garage where we would plug it in. The next step... go in the house to shut down the main breaker switch. Wouldn't you know it, as I came around the corner to go inside, I see a light on in the kitchen! Lucky, right? One would think so. When we first moved into this house we had power outages all the time, and sometimes they would last for more than a day or two. We decided we needed a generator, for such emergencies. We got one and wired it to the main breaker box in the house so that all we had to do was plug it in and flip a few switches. We haven't used it yet! Is it so wrong to want a power outage that lasts a while so we can test out our generator? Maybe it's better to try hard to be prepared and then hope it never has to be tested. Spending the morning in the dark made me wonder, though, what it would've been like back before electricity - getting up with the sun and going to sleep when it got dark. Sometimes I wish things could be that simple, but then I realize that I wouldn't want to have to do things like pluck chickens, milk cows, live on a farm, or do without all the conveniences we have now. So now I have to look at the generator sitting in the living room all day. Maybe I'll set a plant on it!