<b>By Lee Scott</b>

Last night, my husband and I enjoyed a candlelight dinner. He cooked hamburgers and corn on the grill. I marinated tomatoes and cucumbers we had picked up from our local produce stand. We ate at our dinner table with multiple candles shimmering in the darkness. It was so romantic.

You guessed it: Our electric was out.

With the temperature at 88 degrees and the heat index at 105 degrees, we  anticipated some kind of rainfall. Of course, associated with bad storms, there are the occasional power outages. The clouds across the creek from us started to mushroom around noon and they grew darker as the day went on. The thunder and lightening in the distance sent the dogs under the bed. Then it got closer. There was a piercing lightening followed by a particularly loud clap of thunder. That did it: The house grew dark.

It’s amazing how quiet the house is when the electric is out — no air conditioning, no refrigerator whirring in the background, no television blaring. The only sound was the ticking of the battery operated clock and the sound of matches as we lit candles.

We still had our iPads and cell phones so we could check out the weather radar and contact SCE&amp;G about the outage. But, in the meantime, we sat in our under-utilized living room with candles and hurricane lanterns and just chatted.

We had a few hours of peace and quiet before the noise returned. Ceiling fans started to turn, the air conditioning kicked on and the television came alive. We were back to normal once again.

Too bad it took a thunderstorm for us to have a romantic dinner.