getting along

the storm started last tuesday afternoon.

since some of you do not live in snowy places, i'm gonna 'splain to you how it went down.

we can and do get a metric crapton of snow on occasion but because it's mostly cold here in the winter, it's nice dry snow that doesn't stick to much as it goes by.

tuesday afternoon, late in the day, the freezing rain started. then overnight that alternated with sleet and sticky slushy snow. so everything got a nice coating of that. and by "everything", i mean roadways, rooftops, tree branches and power lines.

so then when the whole thing converted over to plain old snow, there was already a layer of slushy ice, or snowglue on everything. oh, and it wasn't windy at all, which is unusual.

so the snow just fell down and stayed wherever it landed.

a lot of which was on tree branches and power lines.

now, see, trees bend. they bend quite a lot sometimes. but the longer they have to stay bent, the more likely it is that they will break.

the weight of the snow alone on powerlines was bad enough and lines were hanging frighteningly low over roads so you sort of wanted to car limbo, but then when trees started falling on lines, all hackensack broke loose.

plus when the snow unloads from the trees there can be a giant WHUMP of a big chunk of snow and anything under it (like a power line) is in some trouble.

it stayed cold for a few days following the four days of the storm, so no relief for the trees. many of them just gave up.

which brings us to sunday.

and then the temperature came above freezing for a little while and there was a little breeze, so more snow unloading, plus when the weight on the bent trees releases, the trees straighten up some and if a power line is in the way, you get more of that nonsense.

so then it's tuesday again, and there's freezing rain and a forecast of more freezing rain and some snow and every day the power goes out and some days it comes back on and some days it doesn't.

my telephone company is keeping phone service going by running a generator when they need to at the relay station a the end of my driveway.

we're all keeping water on hand. when the storm started i had three gallons of drinking water which is plenty for one person for a a couple of days, but not if you want to flush any toilets, so i got to melting snow.

of course i could have gone and bought more water, but you don't really need to pay for drinking water just so you can flush toilets, especially if you have a toasty fire going in the fireplace.

plus i had just come back from a camping trip for which i had made a spiffy snow melting funnel out of some milk jugs and duct tape.

it's going to be a couple of days before we get reliable uninterrupted power, i think.


i'll let you know how it goes.