The dead hand of winter is long forgotten; now we sit around basting in our own juices, complaining about the heat, looking toward the temperate hand of September to bring us relief. We're hopeless. We're never happy.
It was worse in the old days -- look at the pictures of people walking around in August wearing corsets cinched so tight their abdominal organs made high, pained, squeaky sounds. Men wearing an entire sheep's worth of wool. No ice, except for a straw-covered block in the dark part of the barn, waiting to be scraped off for lime rickeys on the Fourth. At least we have air conditioning. Except, of course, when we don't.
Back up a bit. Got a call from the power company; they wanted to put a kill switch on our A/C unit. Sure! Come on over, and make sure you take out the ice cream and leave it on the counter for three hours while you're at it. But they made a good pitch: They could turn it off only a few times a day for a few minutes, and only so many times, and only if the moon is in the seventh house, and Reddy Kilowatt is so starved for juice he's busted at Cub for opening battery packs and sucking down the juice, etc.
I said sure, and they installed a module -- using ninjas at midnight, apparently, since I never saw them -- and so far, so good.
It just seems odd for the energy company to ask you to use less. It's like the American Milk Council running ads that say, "Got milk? No? Good." Not even cigarette companies ask you to smoke less. If they still ran TV ads, they'd be dealing with declining sales by trying to popularize smoking two at once. ("You Have Two Lungs. Don't Let One Feel Left Out.") But we don't have enough juice, and the overtaxed grid takes to the fainting couch when undue strains are placed upon it. Everything's at max capacity, some guy in Burnsville plugs in the toaster, flame shoots from a transformer in Manitoba, and three counties blink out.
We need more power -- but it's more likely the power company will ask if they could disable the DARK setting on your toaster in times of peak usage.
That said: I like a blackout now and then. There's always that what-the moment of surprise when the entire modern world checks out all at once. You wonder if there's some guy in an Xcel control room mopping up the coffee he spilled into the sparking panel, shouting, "I SAID, MY BAD, OK?" The computer blinks off as though you've offended it; the air conditioner sighs in defeat and whines down; everything's quiet. A dog barks down the street. You hear a kid's bike bell. It's 1909. Mother, fetch the ambergris lamp, I'd like to spell myself with the Good Book before I turn in. 'Tis nigh on th' half-to-8.
It's really quite nice, until your laptop battery dies and the kids tire of UNO by flashlight. You wonder if you should call. This is an ancient instinct; when I was a kid, we called the power company to tell them we had no power. Somehow I think they knew. Oh, that's what the sirens here are all about. Certainly explains the flashing red Xs on the displays, too. Thank you, sir! We thought the Cubans had landed. Eventually you give up and go to bed. And everything comes back to life at 3 a.m., which is great if you're already up to milk the cows, but being awakened by the TV blaring a Billy Mays infomercial is like owning an alarm clock that blows a train horn in your ear.
So we need more power. If we do have a blackout; don't blame me; I let them put the module on my A/C unit, and I'm saving money. This year alone I'll save one-tenth the cost of everything we throw out of the freezer when the blackout hits.
jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz.
