Did you ever see the movie "Groundhog Day?"
Of course you did. I guess that's sort of like asking if you ever saw "Forrest Gump" ... or ... "Titanic."
Anyway, since you almost certainly have seen "Groundhog Day," I'm sure I won't have to mention the general theme of the story — but I will anyway.
The star, Bill Murray, kept living the same day (Groundhog Day) over and over again.
Shoot, the idea has almost become a cliche. If you mention "Groundhog Day" to anyone, it's practically code language for experiencing a really bad sense of deja vu.
Locally, we've taken that concept to new extremes lately.
The icy weather we've been experiencing this week apparently has put an excessive demand on the state power grid. To keep from having total blackouts, so–called "rolling blackouts" were initiated.
I knew nothing about this when the first one occurred in my neighborhood. It came shortly before 6 a.m. I was still in bed, and there wasn't much noise or light in my apartment at that hour so my first indication that anything was different was when I woke up and realized I felt cold. I looked at my clock, and the digital numbers were not illuminated — and right away I knew the power was off.
I was searching in the dark for a flashlight when the power came back on about 20 minutes after it went off. I fixed some breakfast and watched the national news. The apartment was warming up again — and the power went off.
It came back on about 20 minutes later, and I immediately checked some local news sources. That was when I learned about the rolling blackouts.
In a way, it was a relief.
I've been living in these apartments for more than 10 years now, and we've had our issues with the utilities. In all fairness, it isn't always a complex issue; sometimes it is the provider's fault. My point is that it is a recurring theme.
Last March, for example, early on a Sunday morning, someone apparently ran his/her car into the power station that serves my apartment complex, and power was cut to all the customers who were served by that station.
Snow had been falling for about an hour before the accident. I never heard whether the snow contributed to what happened, but I have a pretty good idea that it did. All I know is we got a ton of the stuff that day — extremely unusual for Dallas, Texas.
I tried repeatedly to reach someone at my apartment complex office, but no one was in the office. The power was off all day, and residents couldn't contact anyone.
There have been other episodes like that, and I wasn't anxious to repeat them, but the knowledge that these rolling blackouts were happening everywhere was reassuring. It meant that the fault wasn't with the apartment complex and it wasn't with the provider. It seemed more like an act of God.
After awhile, though, I began to feel like Bill Murray, looking for new ways to make the most use of the hour of power that I would get before being plunged into a comparatively brief period of nothing.
There is talk that there will be more of these rolling blackouts tomorrow. Local temperatures are not expected to rise above the mid 20s.
Makes me nostalgic for those days when temperatures around here were in the 70s. Was it only last weekend?
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