Dude. California. "Rolling blackouts" are something you put on your calendar. You can actually find out ahead of time when you'll be without power.

(Although it didn't happen last year. Today it's 105, though, and they've started talking about it again.)

as a kid i loved blackouts
watching the city go black
candles
but then i think son of sam was running around outside
oh yeah and riots

My supplier sems to be slightly better, but there are indications that this may not last, as their infrastructure is sadly under-maintained and neglected - we just made it through last summer without rolling blackouts, but will most likely not make it through next summer unless something drastic changes.

Given the population growth in this area, though, I feel for them, having to provide for massive growth without any real assistance to develop the infrastructure to cope with it.

Still, if I feel nasty about them, I can cast my mind back to a decade ago when the power workers went on strike so the state government sacked the lot of them - rolling blackouts across the state in the order of one hour on, one hour off were the norm then and we are not likely to see that sort of thing again, so maybe that is progress.

DTE is also the name of a piece of software used by lawyers and paralegals to track time.

well lawyer time always sucks
by the hour

ethylene, you should submit this to The Atlantic Monthly:

as a kid i loved blackouts
watching the city go black
candles
but then i think son of sam was running around outside
oh yeah and riots

I probably shouldn't tell you this, but my power comes from a talisman my mother gave me that I wear around my neck. It contains a lock of my great grandmother's hair, the bullet that killed my great uncle (it looks like a deflated balloon), dirt from a patch of ground my parents farmed before I was born, and two pieces of paper. Written on one is the word "vera," truth. The other piece of paper is smaller and very brown, and it says "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul
by making me hate him." Booker T. Washington said that. These things are wrapped in a thick, leathery cloth my mother said was the oldest thing in the family, and this amulet is my power supplier.

I have no complaints.

pst- obviously, it depends where you are in DTE's service area. Our power rarely goes out for more than a minute. Neither does my parents'. I'd bet that you're in an older, more populous area, with a maze of pole-mounted power lines running everywhichway, and lots of residential and business A/C. And lots of trees. (It's generally considered a good idea to fix all of the line breaks before powering the lines up.)