I'm back after 36+ hours of no power after the New England ice storm. (Oh, sweet internet, how I have missed you.) I see the
news made Yahoo! News "Most Popular" section, so many of you may have heard of our plight. Frankly, we had it made compared to those who are dependant on power for heat as the temperatures dipped into the single digits last night.
For those of you that have experienced a natural disaster (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood) an ice storm is unlike those for a couple of reasons: it is insidious as it can sneak up on you while you're sleeping and you have no idea anything is wrong until you wake up in the morning, and when you do wake up and look outside, you can't help but think how beautiful it looks with everything looking crystalline as it's covered in ice.
We could couldn't shower or flush (electric water pumps), but we had our pond to get buckets of water for manual flushing and heated water from our ten gallon stores for sponge baths. Our furnace didn't work, but we have two wood stoves and a parlor stove to keep us warm. We could cook on our gas cook top after lighting it with match, and candles provided our light. When the refrigerator/freezer started to feel not so cold, mother nature provide food storage on the deck. We might have felt the the Ingalls family in "Little House in the Big Wood", but we had only hours to endure what they coped with for a lifetime.
Yes, it put a temporary cramp in my holiday preparations, but it was fun last night as we sat around the parlor stove, roasting marshmallows, reading, knitting and talking. Pipsqueak fell asleep by the fire, and I carried her to bed. I'm glad the power is back on, but living the "simple" life for a day and a half wasn't so bad either.
I did not lose the joy!
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11 comments:
Wow that is soooo gorgeous!! I know its deadly too though. So glad you guys had stoves and fireplaces to help keep you warm and give light. And that it was short-lived. My puter is on the fritz(bad) so I may not be on much, darn it.
Molly
these photos are stunning although I know how dangerous this type of storm can be. I'm relieved that your power came on so quickly. We had a rare day of snow here but luckily the power has stayed on. I pray you stay warm. I'm useless when the power goes off and I lose the internet.
yay, you didn't lose your joy! :)
lovely photos (but scary, uh?)
what beautiful photographs.
that was very resourceful of you to stick through the power outage. and it's a great thing you loved it that way too. i would have muttered and stuttered...just a little. :)
Glad you made it through the storm okay! I agree with the others--your photos are so pretty!
As usual, your pictures take me right there. Wow... Living in the southern part of the country, our circumstances are quite the opposite when power goes out. Our houses turn into ovens with no means of cooling them. I miss the sense of self-sufficiency through adversity up there... and I'm sure you will too, sometime in May.
Wow, gorgeous photos! I guess not so gorgeous when you are without power though. We are pretty much all electric! We do have a generator, but I don't think it would run the central heat! My parents had a kerosene heater for emergencies (we always had to crack a window!)
Blessings,
Lorilee
Ah, yes, we get them here, too. They're beautiful and yet unbelievably irritating. Not to mention completely dangerous.
A few enlargements and a few more of the many moods from your devoted hubby http://picasaweb.google.com/rickread/FB20081215?authkey=OBg-ccwzk2k#slideshow
Gorgeous and insidious danger indeed.
Rick in VT
Wow, that's lovely. Thanks for the extra photos, Rick. Is that a graveyard or a vegetable garden down the hill?
I'm glad you have the means to survive an outage! Here, not so much, but we muddle through.
stunning photos.. glad you got power and internet back now... I can only just remeber the bad winter storms when I was little and lived on a farm in rural New York. I live in the middle of England now and the weather never gets quite so cold here.
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