Reliability is a big deal in this business. Take your average person and ask him or her what's the most important thing about their electric service and they will tell you price. Take that same average person and ask him or her what's the most important thing about their electric service after the power's been out for a couple of hours and they will call you a lot of very bad names and say in no uncertain terms that getting the damn power back on is the most important thing and you'd better do it right damn lickity-split now if you know what's good for you, you (more bad names). As an experienced electric utility professional, I can tell you that the appropriate response to this kind of exchange is, "Thank you Parson, we're working on it."

And boy, have we been working on it. Starting about mid-June, we've had a series of storms roll through that managed to ball up whole sections of distribution line. The most memorable was probably on the Summer Solstice, which you Druids out there know to be June 21st. Wind shear topping 70 mph started unzipping line in the north about 5PM and continued all the way down to the south. We lost over a dozen structures and at one point, our entire eastern service territory was out of lights. Thanks to some pretty heroic work by our crews, we had everybody back on by midnight except, of course, for those members that in some small way had previously displeased me. How do you like me know, Parson?

Just kidding. Anyway, we take this stuff really seriously. The vast majority of our outages are caused by weather and in this neck of the woods, weather generally means wind. Not nice, steady wind like the wind the Governor of Kansas stupidly thinks is going to replace great big honking coal-fired generating stations, but rather the kind of wind that takes your neighbor's hot tub and puts it in your rose bushes. The kind of wind that shuts down the freeway and puts tractor trailers in the bar ditch dirty-side up, the where's-my-swamp-cooler type of wind is what I'm talking about.

According to El Paso weathercasters, between March 1st and July 1st, southern New Mexico averages about seven sandstorms a year. So these things are not uncommon. This year however, probably because of an overabundance of high level hot air turbulence occasioned by the Presidential primaries, we have been blessed with 16 of these so-called "wind events". Coupled with almost total lack of rainfall, the results have been spectacular, indeed. The only thing missing necessary to make this season truly memorable would be the introduction of, I don't know, maybe a plague of locusts.

Incidentally, those of you readers carefully monitoring your antidepressant medications may reccall a couple of months ago I mentioned that like Eskimo names for snow, we have multiple names for wind. Well, it turns out that the venerable Deming Headlight, through exhaustive investigative research typical of their fine news organization, has determined the definitive word for this meteorologically induced phenomenon.

Are you ready? Okay, here goes: It's called a Haboob. No, really. I'm not kidding. Honest. That's what they said. They had a picture and everything.

Anyway, haboob is supposed to be an Arabic word for sandstorm and if you've ever watched any of those old Peter O'toole movies, you know that those Arabs know their sandstorms, so who are we, as simple American carbon-constrained consumers, to cast dispersions or question their linguistic choices. Plus, Arabs have most of our money today and probably all of it tomorrow, so it might be prudent to start learning a little Arabic right now so as to fit into our evolving future as UAE house servants and day workers. Those of us who become sufficiently fluent may even get a chance to chauffeur the Rolls, which in the New Energy World will be considered to be the ultimate of career aspirations. I, for one, plan to fit right in.

So haboob it is. Allah be praised.