The other day, A Year Without A Santa Claus was on TV. Who hasn't seen Tanta Kringle sing about being the king's #1 toy maker or felt kinda bad for the kids in Sombertown because it was illegal to play with toys? The kid in me rose up and I kept the show on. There are two big battles in the show. The battle between the evil Burgermeister against the good-hearted Kringles, and the battle between the sons of Mother Nature, Heat Meiser and Cold Meiser. These two duke it out over who gets a white Christmas and who gets rain. These guys are funny and imaginative characters with catchy little life-jingles. If Snowy was really out there, we got a blast of his cold breath last Thursday and Friday.
The weather forecasters were saying a big, bad ice/snow storm was on it's way. After lots of less than accurate predictions from them, I pretty much take what they say with a grain of salt. Did I grocery shop? Nope. Did I expect the power to go out? Maybe, but not for very long. Did I cover my car with a shower curtain so I wouldn't have to scrape ice off the windshield? Yes, I did do that. Were the weathermen right this time? For the most part, they were. We lost power for a whopping 25 hours, and that was pretty good, compared to so many other people. That is the advantage to living so close to Route 9 where all the businesses are. They have a higher importance-level priority and get their power back on right away and as a result, so do we. Here's some shots of our National Grid-free day.
My cats have the ability to find the warmest places to hang out. Mouse has so much hair, she can sprawl, but Tiki wanted more help from the hanging coats.....
There is a huge Maple tree in front of our house. The ice caused lots of trees to snap branches, including that one. The limbs that broke fell right onto my driveway and missed my car by mere inches. The picture shows only half of what fell and they were alot bigger (and heavier) than how they look in the pic. If either of us had parked in front of the garage, it would have been time to call the insurance company......
When we bought our house, I was thrilled that we had a gas stove/oven so I could still cook when the power was out. Come to find out, our model has a safety feature in it to shut off the gas supply to the burners when a power failure occurs. That made us have to pull out the good ol' Coleman camping stove in order to make a hot meal....
A few days after buying our house, we had an ice storm that knocked the power out. This was a bitter sweet event for us. The bad thing was it made the sump pump stop so our basement begin to back up with water, and it got cold quick without the furnace doing it's job. Welcome to homeownership! My father brought over a small generator so we could keep those things running. The good thing about it was it made us realize right away that we needed a generator of our own, so we did buy one way back then. It was there for us when we needed it this time! We were able to keep the furnace on, the sump pump kept going, our fridge got plugged in, and one light.
So, we survived what has been dubbed on the radio as the "Ice Storm of 2008". When a quarter of a million people loose power, I guess it is an event worthy of a title. When I look out my window, there is no dreaming of a white Christmas.....
...unless Mr White Christmas retreats again for a while...which would be ok with me.
1 comment:
Hey with some of those branches gone in the front yard, you won't have as many leaves to rake next fall!
We finally got power on Monday around 5:30....we went 3 days 17hrs! Talk about being new homeowners and completely unprepared!
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