Last weekend, Mother Nature unleashed her fury on Toronto in the form of an ice storm. Everything in the city glittered under a thick layer of ice and the streets were as slick as skating rinks. We were reminded how nature’s force can be both strikingly beautiful and amazingly destructive. Trees, heavy with the weight of the ice on their boughs, simply snapped, falling onto homes, streets and, most frustratingly, power lines. Thousands of people were left without power as temperatures dipped below zero. I was one of those people. In fact, our power was off for eight days.

Of course, that came with its share of frustrations. For one, we learned the value of sharing body heat, as the temperature in our apartment plummeted. Pizza boxes piled up in our recycling bin as we had no means of cooking, even after we got a generator to power the heat. Navigating our home by candlelight and crossing our fingers for warm water from the shower head were both equally annoying. And of course, there was no wifi. We, like so many others, were unplugged.