At 4:15 on August 14th, I turned on the lights in the laundry room of my house and the whole house went dark. It took me about a half-hour to figure out that the whole city was down, and shortly after that I realised that the entire Eastern Seaboard was blacked out.

It was interesting and exciting, but the real magic happened after dark, when I strolled through my inky-black neighbourhood and glimpsed the Milky Way as I strolled down Bloor Street.

The power in my house came back at 11:00 p.m., but even by noon the next day, parts of my neighbourhood were still in the dark.