I'm alive and no, we're not on vacation in Florida yet -- soon! Frankly we can't get there quickly enough. December in CT sucked. Unusually cold and then there was the blizzard the day after Christmas. I have no idea how much snow we got because the insane winds whipped it all over the place. We came through the storm just fine, though a line came down at the end of the street and the plows couldn't come down with the loose wire on the road, so we were in effect snowed in. I got outside on Monday afternoon (nice start to our vacation week) and took some photos:
Lee had already done some shoveling, so this snow pile wasn't a result of the drifting:
A cold self-potrait:
I loved the long shadows on the veggie garden all tucked in for the winter under its snow blanket (though it didn't last even the week, we did have a brief thaw):
Nope, still didn't get around to buying a new umbrella cover, that red umbrella should be even more faded by the spring. What you can't see in this photo is that those houses lost power the night before around 11:30pm in the storm when the wire went down and a transformer blew. I did trek over to our immediate neighbor's house to see how they were faring without power and heat. They had their fireplace roaring, a kerosene heater, and an extension cord going to another neighbor for power. I also made about the 3rd call to CL&P about the downed wire:
SS2 parks his car in a lot down the street so we were able to get him back on the road, but our street was stubbornly un-plowed and un-drivable. Now none of this mattered until 5:50pm on Monday when our power went out. Turns out the wire that was down in the street all day (which we all walked right by) was live and that CL&P could only power it down by turning off our whole street. I bundled up and hauled ass up the street to the Canadian utility workers sitting in a parking lot to ask how long it would be until the power came back on. It wasn't good news. They were functioning on 2.5 hours sleep and it would be dangerous for them to work through the night plus our repair was going to take a good 5-6 hours. It was going to be a long cold night. We sent SS2 to his maternal grandparents for the night, but decided that we had plenty of blankets and would be more comfortable at home despite offers from friends to come pick us up and stay the night with them. I have a ton of candles so light wasn't an issue, but my laptop wasn't fully charged when the power went off, so we only got part way through a movie before it died. We did a lot of reading by candlelight and flashlight that evening:
We woke up to a 43 degree house (brrrrrrr!), but a plowed road. We dug out, washed up quickly with the hot water still in the tank (definitely better insulated than the house), and headed off to Starbucks. It was bliss to have hot coffee and hot chocolate, power to charge laptops, and internet again (thank goodness for my BB Torch which was fully charged and got me through the night) and I finished the movie from the previous evening (Italian Job -- always fun to watch no matter how many times I see it). Lunch out, True Grit at the movie theater, and then home. No power yet, but a promise from the nice Canadians that it would be on within 15 minutes. We went back out, grabbed a drink, and returned home to 43 degrees, but blissful power and heat. All was back to normal within 2 hours. But after that adventure I didn't feel like doing much for the rest of our vacation week. We saw a few more movies -- Black Swan and The Fighter and we recommend them, though True Grit was probably our favorite -- and before we knew it we were back at work and here it is Thursday. More snow in the forecast tomorrow and we can't wait to take off for sunny, warm Florida.
Nice post. I love it. Waiting your new posts. Thank you...
Posted by: Devremülk | January 07, 2011 at 11:39 AM
Yikes! It is tough to be without power for long on these coldest days. I am grateful for our woodstove every day!
Posted by: commonweeder | January 10, 2011 at 08:31 AM