Keepin' green despite the cold?

Karen P-V has a hilarious, angst-ridden blog post on her utter failure to keep green during Snow Storm 2011. She kept her faucets dripping so the water wouldn't freeze. Her hot water pipes froze because she had insulated her nearby water heater. Her Energy Star windows had cracks. Her heater came on every 10 minutes. And she took her car instead of bicycling because it was too cold.

Aah... She shouldn't worry so much. I had major drafts also but I couldn't manage to care (cold weather does that to me). I mean, we stuffed the cracks with old tee-shirts and all. We're not savages.

The only thing I was mildly curious about was why some people had blackouts and not others and why some people had longer blackouts than others. But there again, I was too lazy to look into it, so I just asked a friend in the media whose job it is to ask these questions to the authorities and here's what he said. (You probably already know this because you are good citizens who keep informed. But in case you are hibernating like me...)

if you were near a critical area (ie hospital, police station) you were never taken off line because they couldn't be taken off line. (well, it depends if you were on their "block". some were, some weren't but more than likely you were.

the blackouts length depended on getting the power consumption usage down to 850-900 megawatts citywide. until they got below that, the blocks they took down were down. but another problem was sometimes when they brought the blocks back up it didn't take and they'd have to send a crew to the field to do it manually (there are thousands of these boxes to turn blocks on/off manually around town).