Life in the woods

At Last! We now have power for a period longer than two hours! Yay!!! It's been a very strange, scary and very wet week.

It started late on Saturday night with a small, forecasted snow storm. Sunday was another snow day, but only a few more inches were add for a total of three. Monday was cold and more snow showers, but nothing nasty. Woke to seven inches in the morning, thinking that this was as much as we were going to get. WRONG!

The snow started coming down at two p.m. and didn't stop until sometime very early morning Wednesday. Along with that snow came high winds which knocked out power at 12:03 a.m. Tuesday morning. When HB got up Wednesday morning, he always gets up very early, the count was about 20 inches. Yep. Almost two feet worth of cold, wet, white stuff. Just like the weathermen predicted, the weather changed and the south winds brought warmer temps and rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain. I spent the day inside stoking the fire and catching up on my reading. Luckily, the weather was warm so the house didn't get too cold. We started the generator around 4:30 to make sure the house would be heated up before we turned it off at 9 p.m.

I did a little winter prep this summer by buying a couple of battery operated camp lamps and I read Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly from the light of those lamps. (So far it's a very good read and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of this country and the Civil War.) I read until midnight and trundled off to bed, hoping the power would come on sometime in the night. No such luck. We finally got the power back on around 10:15 a.m., right after I started the fire in the stove. The lights went out, came on, went out again and then came back on for good. Until 1:45 p.m. Glad I kept the fire going. I cooked my lunch on the Franklin stove, (if you don't have a cast iron skillet, why not?), kept the dog busy with his rawhide bone and did a bit more catch up on my magazines.

We lost a lot of branches from the trees around the place, but what broke my heart was the beautiful maple that split. It broke a third of itself and now I'm afraid we'll have to take the whole thing out. I love that tree. When it came down, it also took the tops out the the two small cedars that I call The Twins. I'll be going down the driveway tomorrow and I've been told it is really bad. I will have to check the rest of property, when the wind dies down, to see what other damage we have. It looks like it will be a very big clean up this spring.