Rolling blackouts and tumbling trees

The neighborhood coordinator has sent email updates on the condition of the neighborhood pursuant to the hard freeze and rolling blackouts. 

There are reports of lawn sprinklers having burst, but at this point, I probably feel like the greatest condolences should be offered to those new buyers on Harvard Pointe who had all those giant queen palms planted in their back yard a very short time ago.  That must have been a significant investment for them, and they flank the southern-most Centerpointe marker sign in such an attractive manner (at least on one side) that they add value to the entire neighborhood.  Hope they survive - but queens do not do well in hard freezes.

There are many questions being asked about the blackouts - like how do we know if one is coming? 

It's generally not practical for the power companies to contact people ahead of time.  Besides, would you really want the locations pre-announced?  The power companies would be alerting criminals, too, as to when your residential alarm would be disabled and when you might not have 911 telephone service.  Myself, I'd rather be surprised. 

But technology being what it is, earlier this evening, someone at Houston Chronicle set up a crowdsourcing map that will at least tell you a bit about where power outages were (uh, how does a person report a power outage via the a website if one does not have power?? smart phones maybe...).

It's not very discriminatory at this point, but perhaps it will become more refined if the blackouts continue tomorrow.

There were a few reports of outages in the general area but they appear to be localized issues only at this point, and none within this neighborhood.  My better half and I have our fingers crossed that perhaps we're on the same circuit as the nearby police station and therefore maybe we won't get shut down (always the optimists).

Anyway, we'll see what the morrow brings.  Hopefully just cold and not a lot of crisis.