What do you do, first?

[MCavity]

First half hour or so? Wind up lanterns & candles. Get correct clothing on (inc) boots, fill the bath, tune the radio in. Stick the kettle on.

[Sunna]

look outside in the past iv had no power and over the road has , tune in find out whats going on ,walk up the street to a field i can see a town about 12 miles away if their off as well ho hum , brew on me hobo .

[MCavity]

Aye Sunna - if it is the end of the world you gotta start off with a decent cuppa

[BeardyMan]

After checking fuses etc, it'll be off to bed for me. No worries about people rampaging here.
Re-assess in the morning. No point scurrying around in the dark panicking, the lights could come back on in an hour or two.

[River Song]

Straight to bed with OH

Can't deal with anything without some serious sex

Then I'll sort out the world (or at least my bit of it)

[David075]

I would go back to sleep get up at 6am go to the local ASDA 24HR (5 to 10 min walk) check and see if it was open, check cash machines
outside of it, this would give me some idea of the situation.

[Nix]

First thing is to check that it's not just our street/area.
Second is to back up the house mains so that lights, fridge, tv and various security still good.
Third, check gear and baseball bat.
Forth, check on two or three vulnerable neighbours
Fith, hit the hay til morning and reassess.

[Rush2112]

the power in our area goes out frequently for no apparent reason, sometimes only for a moment, sometimes for hours.

first thing I check is the cell phone, if it still has signal then I know right away its not a severe crisis. then go back to sleep.
if there is no signal then still don't know extent of the outage, but know its not just our neighborhood. (its very flat where we live so we cant see other areas). go back to sleep

on wakeup if situation remains same, try battery radio. if nothing on there, then game on. at least I got some sleep though!

[bigpaul]

our area is on the end of the supply chain for EVERYTHING, food deliveries, fuel deliveries, electricity.......any of these can go down at a moments notice....usually WITHOUT notice! fairly common in rural areas I believe.

[Jonas]

The last thing I'd do is show any lights. I'd look out the window to check if the whole town was out, try the land-line phone to the fire department dispatch to see what was going on. If land-line was out (this would be a big deal since land-line phone have a completely separate power grid) then flip on the SW to copy US traffic. If outages are being widely reported, deploy the WaterBobs in the bath tubs, notify the next-door neighbor (who would notify his next-door neighbor and so on), lock and load, and await daylight.

Sorry River Song, but the wife and I are too old for "panic sex"!