and, we are told, it will stay on, at least during the next announced PSPS. How quickly the whole thing becomes common, last night – at dinner with the lights on – I had to ask what the initials PSPS stood for when Craig referred to the pending outage. Now I see the Governor is also using PSPS, now we all know PSPS means Public Safty Power Shutoff. Public Safty Power Shutoff is so descriptive and yet we know that it took some work to come up with a name that works so well as an initialism. As an aside, I thought it was an acronym but to be an acronym, it must be pronounceable as a word. End aside.

Still, SPSP entering our common lexicon does not lessen the effect. For some people, it is a huge inconvenience, for us, I am well aware, the SPSP has been a pretty minor event. That minor event is only on a sliding scale, however. On an absolute scale, the PSPSes are still a big inconvenience. The first time the power went out, it was pretty warm but this last time, the temp was in the mid-forties and that is cold to be sitting around in and even worse when getting up in the dark. The only way to really get toasty is to go to bed or leave the house. Our home is no longer a refuge from the outside world, now, the outside world is a refuge from our home. That is stressful.

I am glad this is happening, though. The fires are exposing our generation’s failure to leave the next generation with a safe home. Our government has failed us and failed our children for generations to come. For me, the most painful part is that, in California, this has happened under the Democratic Party. Our Public Utility Commission has not fulfilled its job in that it has not controlled PG&E or made us safer. Here, big money is still running the game.