I heard about the power outage in the northeast late last night. Two things struck me right away:

1) How relatively unaffected I was by it.
The blackout had been going on for HOURS before I even heard about it. I checked the news for the first time late last night, and even now I'm feeling no effects of it. That's probably because I'm down here in Texas buried in work in my cubicle or so exhausted at home that I just eat dinner and go to bed. Geez. I need to get out of my office and do something this weekend.

2) How dependent we are on electricity.
This summer blackout reminds me of the winter blackout eastern Canada experienced in, oh, I think it was 1998? When there's a blackout these days, everything just shuts down. It's one thing when a neighborhood loses power, (which often happens here when we have a major tropical storm or hurricane), but the inconvenience only amounts to having to break out some Sterno or the manual can opener. (As a side note, the absence of certain sounds is a nifty side effect. There's no constant hum of things like computers and refrigerators, freezers or your neighbor's air-conditioning, etc. Jeff was once reading a cool book, by Michael Crichton: Timeline. Some scientists travel back through time, yadda, yadda, yadda. In this case though, the author paid attention to the fact that we'd probably notice the absence of our ubiquitous modern sounds. Airplanes, far-off highway noises, the constant hum of electricity and human life...)

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes.

But an outage on this scale, one that causes nuclear reactors to shut down? Now *that's* a major headache. It's a sad sign of the times when so many people wonder at first if it was terrorist related. Down here we tend to strain the power grid in the winter-time when we have some freakishly cold weather. People here aren't used to cold weather and we all crank up our heaters even while we continue to use other electrical things. In the summertime, you'll find more tolerance for hot weather, especially if it's just dry heat. Simple fans going in some areas long before the air conditioning is turned on full blast. And people tend to conserve electricity in other ways to keep their summer electric bills down, or to keep from generating more heat. We're used to heat, and our power companies are used to the demand during the summer. But not during the winter.

It seems to me that it's the opposite up north. Winter storms, plunging temperatures, ice and snow are something folks up there know how to deal with. Even the clothing available to keep you warm is different than what you find down here. (When I went to Chicago for a conference in October last year, I was woefully unprepared for cold windy temperatures with my flimsy jacket, lack of layers, acrylic mittens and thin socks.) There's a higher tolerance and preparedness for lower temperatures. You even see coat racks everywhere! (That's noticeably absent in stores and offices down here.) You can always tell which students on campus are from up north when winter arrives in Texas. The natives are bundling up in long sleeves, pants and jackets when temperatures drop below 65 degrees and the folks from up north are still walking around in shorts when it's 45 or 50 out.

But summer temperatures? I don't know how many times I've smiled when I heard a friend or family member from Canada exclaim that 85 degrees was "hot". And like some folks down here dispense with heaters, there are folks up north who've never touched air conditioning. So when temperatures rise into the 90's or freakishly into the 100's ... I sympathize. I have trouble with 100+ temps and I'm *used* to it, not to mention properly physically and culturally prepared for it.

And what is it with these weird weather patterns anyway? While folks in northern latitudes are sweating, we just got over a brief two week spell of 100 degree temps and we're back into the upper 70's and lower 80's. It's breezy and cool here. IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST. Not that I'm complaining mind you. It's lovely and I hope it continues. It's just baffling.

Speaking of weather, there's a tropical storm motoring across the Gulf right now. It could make landfall as a hurricane by Saturday. We'll see if their landfall predictions are correct by then.

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