Electricity came back on at 22:42, while I was on the phone with Sheepie, just as she was checking the BGE outage website for me, to see whether it had anything useful to say about Mom's neighbourhood.
I turned on an overhead lamp to better see the stuff I was plugging back in (on the powerstrip the cablemodem and router/hub are attached to, I'd unplugged everything else so I could just plug the conveniently located other end of it into the inverter), and realized that I'd been looking at the inside of this house by candlelight for just long enough that electric light made it look wrong. (I'm pretty sure this effect will have gone away by the time I wake up in the morning.)