Yeah, here's that blackout entry I promised. Completed around 10:30 p.m., Aug. 14, 2003.

It was just around 4:10 this afternoon when we got that first blink of the lights at work.

"Woah," a few people said, their heads turned toward the ceiling where many lights had dimmed for a moment and then come back on. For some, the split-second power loss was enough to turn off their computers.

Seconds later, everything -- the lights, computers, printers, fax machines, televisions -- went dark with that characteristic low "beooooooop" of a power outage. This time, nothing came back on. The sun shone brightly through the windows along one wall and the spotlights from the two emergency exit signs clicked on, but all else was dark. It wasn't just our office, either, for out in the hallway employees from the various companies started to emerge.

With the computers down and work suspended for us, we got up and started talking quickly and loudly about the power and the weird coincidence that one off-site employee 20 miles north, just over the border in New York State, had also lost power. Some of us -- myself among them -- suspected the construction crew working on expanding a car dealership down the street, thinking that maybe the entire highway up to New York was affected.

It was, and more.

People started making phone calls, if they could. The office phones worked, but many of the numbers they tried to dial were not in service, either because they were cell phones on either an overloaded or powerless system, or because they were offices without power themselves. As a few people managed to get through to parents and friends elsewhere, a few details began to emerge: Manhattan has no power, either. Neither does Brooklyn.

"Um, everybody?" someone said after hanging up the phone. "This is bad. There's power out in Cleveland, Detroit, and parts of Canada..."

Her voice was shaking. We all knew what she was thinking, and she admitted it later: She was thinking of September 11. She was thinking of terrorism. So were the officials in New York. They quickly managed to determine that the problem was with the power grid and not with security, and they made sure the media outlets knew this as well.

"As soon as I heard Canada was affected too, I knew it couldn't be terrorism," one co-worker cracked. "But wait a minute ... I'm a little bothered by the fact that our energy is somehow connected to them."

I think he was kidding.

Learning later that the suspected center of the outage was in the Niagara Falls/Buffalo area, and then seeing it on a map, it became more conceivable: Buffalo is in the center of a large circle that encompasses Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa and the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area.

After half an hour or 45 minutes, our lights came back on, though our server remained down and internet access was unavailable. In other words, we had our computers, we just couldn't really use them for work. It was like having the canned food in the bomb shelter but forgetting the can opener back in the house.

With power back, we turned on the television. The images were eerie, and very reminicent of 9/11: New Yorkers flooded the streets and slowed traffic in an attempt to leave their offices and find some way home in a city in which mass transit is the backbone of life. The subways were stopped and the tunnels and bridges were closed. The helicopters hovered over the New York Waterways ferry terminal near 42nd St. on the Hudson River, broadcasting images of a stagnant mass of people trying to work their way onto one of two ferries that could take them back to New Jersey.

After several more surges and brief outages, it became clear by 6 p.m. that sticking around would be fruitless. We'd tried to wait it out to avoid a jam-packed Friday, but there was little we could do (in part because all the designers had gone home 15 minutes after the initial outage). We were told to arrive at 8 a.m. tomorrow and many started heading home.

Except for everyone who lives in New York. First they were worried about the traffic and maneuverability in Manhattan, then they learned that with the George Washington Bridge closed to inbound traffic, even if they wanted to, they couldn't get home. Some made arrangements to stay with friends or family west of the Hudson, either in New Jersey or upstate New York. One Manhattanite chose to drive 90 minutes to his Pennsylvania cabin rather than try to get to his Upper East Side apartment. Gary thought about speeding up a purchase he's been considering: a bicycle, thinking that he could pedal across the GWB and down to Union Square.

I left at 6:40 and made it home in 20 minutes, avoiding some of the traffic snarls around the GWB entrance and passing countless cops directing cars through intersections with blinking or blank traffic lights. I returned home to a powerless neighborhood and Casey, who was supposed to attend a press event in Manhattan and was standing at a bus stop at 4:40 when I found her and explained that New York was blacked out too. We I realized that we could enjoy a mac and cheese dinner and take care of some of the milk (in case the power was out for a while) because of our gas stove. Well, it may be a gas stove, but it's an electric spark to start the stove, so we were out of luck (not wanting to play with matches). Instead, we made a lone, quick dash into the fridge (so as to not let too much of the cold air escape) for some cheese and two beers and ate cheese and crackers and peanuts for dinner.

In the living room, we read for a while in the fading daylight, then moved out to the patio where the light was better after it began fading inside. Soon, dusk won and we sat there watching the neighborhood, the cars rolling by with their working air conditioners. We took note of a plane ascending from the east, a sign that LaGuardia was again allowing flights to depart.

Deciding that we should drive down to the river to see the Manhattan skyline during a blackout, we went inside to gather the car keys when Casey gasped at the blinking red numbers of the bedside clock radio. "It's back!" she said at 8:32 p.m.

Still, we wanted to see the City. Most of the neighborhoods between our house and the riverfront remained dark, as did River Road in Edgewater. We continued south, then turned back up the hill and parked were we could walk down the street to an view unobstructed by trees and buildings. With the exception of scattered emergency lights and the blinking red warning lights atop buildings intended to keep planes away, Manhattan was ghostly. Trying to deliniate the buildings from the slate gray sky behind them was a difficult exercise. Further south, in lower Manhattan, it appeared some lights were beginning to come back, as the radio reports had just said. Sections of the Bronx and a few scattered midtown locations were reported as getting their power back, we learned. Straight across from where we stood, I noticed between two buildings what looked like the bright lights of Yankee Stadium's outer illumination. The Yankees' game in Baltimore was unaffected, though Shea Stadium was evacuated and the Mets' game with the Giants postponed.

Back home, Casey made some soup and I read about Ted Williams' disembodied head in Sports Illustrated (this week's 50 states tour stop is New Jersey!), but now, facing an 8 a.m. reporting time, I should probably go to bed. Although the open windows on three sides of our living room are providing a decent cross-breeze at the moment, I'm happy we're able to settle into bed in an air conditioned bedroom tonight.

As for New York, let's see how many babies are born around the middle of next May.