Power Cuts

Power cuts and load-shedding are part of daily life in Nepal. People work their lives around them, and after a while you stop noticing. In the mountains a power cut can last anywhere from 1-2 seconds to several hours. When it's shorter ones there tends to be lots, but you never actually have any idea of how long the power will be out for.
We're actually quite lucky in the mountains. Although our cuts are scheduled and can last any amount of time, we have power fairly often, and usually in the evening. In Kathmandu the power cuts are 12 hours per day, and apparently often in the evenings. The trade off though, is that with a scheduled cut you can plan cooking rice for when the power will be on, instead of it being half done and the power cutting, which happens to us once in a while.
Outside of cooking rice, power cuts don't affect our lives very much. You just do everything by torch and candlelight instead of overhead light. With the possibility of it cutting at any moment, once it starts to get dark you always know in the back of your mind exactly where your headtorch and all the house candles are, to the point of easily being able to find them in the dark. We can all make our way to the kitchen from any part of the house, find a candle, light the stove, and light the candle from the stove, all in the pitch dark. And we haven't even eaten that many carrots!
Power cuts are such a part of Nepali life that mobile phones come complete with flashlights. I've even found a lighter with a flashlight on it!
Some nights I live in my headtorch, reflexively turning it on and off as the power does the same. I don't really even notice it any more, just turn it on and continue what I was doing. When the power goes out, conversation doesn't even pause, just continues like nothing happened, while one person goes and finds a light. Actually, we don't really look for lights anymore, as one person inevitably has one on them.
Some people, particularly hotels and restaurants, have generators, although some private homes do as well. Usually they're only turned on when needed, so when the power goes off there's a little while of dark before the lights come on again. Still, I don't really notice, and prefer when the lights are left off and just candles used.
The roof is a great place to be in the evening when the power is often going on and off. When it is on, you can see the lights of Gorkha across the valley, and many lights interspersed among the trees near the roof. When it goes off, the whole world suddenly goes dark, and then lights up when it comes back on. It's almost like the world is coming back to life.