A Shot in the Dark

It's cold here. Finally, legitimately, cold. When it got down to the 30s around Christmas, it was chilly. I got out my gloves and hat, and carried on. I went home to Cleveland, enjoyed seeing the snow, shivered, and came back down here to Texas where it was probably in the 40s. This morning, it was 21 when I went out to my car at 10:30am, and I would call that actually cold. Of course, I already knew that it was actually cold because my apartment has zero insulation and incredibly leaky sliding glass doors. Last night, I slept with long underwear on under my PJs, which I have never done before! To be fair, that's probably because somehow I never thought of it before. Anyway, apparently I am not alone in thinking that this is legitimately cold, because apparently Texas ran out of power. That's right, folks. With wind-chills in the teens, the Great State of Texas is enforcing rolling blackouts. As one radio show put it this morning, "Wouldn't it suck if you were homeless, and you finally decided that breaking and entering was better than freezing to death and you broke in somewhere only to find that the power was off?" I had power this morning in my apartment, and consequently heat, but who knows what the day will hold. Hopefully my cats and instruments will not have exploded due to the cold if the power's out for a while, because it surely won't stay warm in there on its own, what with the practically open to the outside situation of the sliding doors. At least one set of friends here were unlucky enough to have had their power shut off around the time they needed to get up. Not much worse than getting out of bed into a refrigerator. My only personal experience with the blackouts so far has been the darkness of the traffic light at 2222 and Lamar on the way to work. It's a big intersection, and it took forever to get through it. Some of you may have heard me explain that I have learned Texans are afflicted with a tragic disability that renders them unable to observe the rules of a four way stop. Luckily, I've found that they are at least by and large observant drivers, so if one just takes one's turn gingerly in such situations, oncoming traffic will yield. So, here I am at work, typing away, scanning documents, and hoping that the power doesn't go out. Less out of a desire to preserve the work I'm doing than out of a desire not to be plunged into total darkness here in my windowless office. Good luck to those of you who are actually suffering from winter weather rather than just poor civic planning! I'm off to download the flashlight app for my phone...