Something about Saturdays and Sundays in downtown Raleigh, N.C., brings out the suicide squirrels.

Their lithe bodies create a circuit at a Progress Energy transformer, shattering the downtown weekend quiet with their arcing demise.

Amid the brief fluctuation of local power line currents that follow, my backup power supply does its job and I am briefly sad.

Not today, and I am glad. This is instead what I call a "low-voltage Saturday."

Although "low-voltage" is a metaphor here, not an engineering summary, the problem is nonetheless one that tortures my faithful backup power supply to shriek in warning. Ruth and Elvy, the black cats who own me, sniff about sympathetically and until I deal with the alarm, meow for me to give it something to relieve the pain.

This has in the past been a wonderfully transitory issue, lasting less than a handful of minutes.

Today, morning ages into afternoon and sunset approaches, yet whatever the true name of the problem, it persists.

On this sad Saturday, Reddy Kilowatt, which as a child I identified with Carolina Power&Light, seems today to have grown old and tired.

I understand and like Ruth and Elvy, sympathize.

It was inevitable, even for a promotional emblem. He is, after all, more than two decades my senior. Reddy was born in 1926, the natural child of Ashton B. Collins Sr. and the Alabama Power Co.

It may be time now for Reddy to give up the brilliant orange-red, cheerful yellow and pure white of his youth. Is it faintly possible that the fine downtown Raleigh office tower headquarters of Progress Energy, formed when Carolina Power & Light merged with Florida Progress Corp., would be well-graced by a version faded throughout to a swamp-water brown?