A forced set of Earth Hours

Rainy River residents and surrounding communities can raise their heads high and say "We gave the Earth more than an hour last week!"
As the world was encouraged to dim its lights for an hour Saturday evening in the name of saving energy or greening the planet, Rainy River area residents were again plunged into darkness for the second time in less than a week.
Last Monday the power went out for 6.5 hours and Saturday for about 3 hours. So while Toronto championed reducing their energy consumption by about 8% we can say we reduced ours by 100% for nearly 10 times longer than Toronto.
For me last Monday the power outage came at the worst possible time... right in the middle of putting the paper together. It made for a very very long day Tuesday, beginning at 2 a.m. and not ending until about 4 p.m.
The frustration of being at the end of a power line is something we all know about here. It is too bad that a deal to hook into the Manitoba Hydro grid, just south of here by a few miles in Minnesota could not be worked out. Then when our power lines are down east of Rainy River we could switch to the other grid and avoid a forced Earth Hour with every major storm that passes.
–Until then,
Ken