So I had a very brief power outage today and now sparrow won't connect to the node again. So strange. My only guess is that because bitcoin core didn't shutdown properly it's causing some issue. Am I just going to have to reinstall bitcoin core everytime my pc shuts down abruptly?
Especially with a spinning drive, in my experience, a harsh shutdown / power cut, doesn't leave the system enough time to write everything to disk and corrupts your blockchain data.
Bitcoin Core can't recover from that by itself and will give you an error log on the next startup. You will need to reindex the whole blockchain to fix this.
Without Bitcoin Core starting properly, obviously there's no way for Sparrow to connect to it.