(there are two fluffy fawns grazing outside my glass door as I write this)You know I love winter . And, yay for me, it came early, this year--significant snow before Thanksgiving, lots more rain, and more snow around New Year's Day. Then came an unusually dry, sunny January--rather warm with only a little rain. Bulbs began to flower, some trees in town were beginning to blossom out. They should know better.
Winter has returned, as we thought it might. Last Thursday and Friday we probably logged nearly a foot of snow. It's gorgeous, of course--the photos you see were taken in the yard on Friday. All white, quiet, soft--and heavy. Branches break, trees fall. One always hopes they don't fall on any cars, houses or power lines. But, predictably, they do.
Last year, we had a few short power outages of less than a day duration. Three years ago, though, there was an 8-day trial-by-sticky hair. It's never all that serious, of course. No need to call the Red Cross or FIMA. A nuisance, but not life-threatening.
Last Thursday evening, snow piling up outside around about bedtime, the darkness and silence descended suddenly, (though not altogether unexpectedly) as a curtain in a cartoon. The lights, TV, furnace all extinguished instantly as we sat on the sofa watching John Stewart. Tom's surge protector upstairs and the smoke alarm in the entry both croaked out pathetic, half-hearted screeches before going quiet. Will it come right back on? Sometimes it does. We waited. Not this time.
So, here's the routine:
1. Grouch around a little--a few seconds only is allowed for this (Tom sometimes takes more).
2. Grab a flashlight--they're stored strategically. Head over to the pantry on the other side of the kitchen to get the battery-powered lanterns down. What's wrong with these things? The same one can be bright one time, dim another, then back to bright. Breathe on them and they go out entirely. It's old fluorescent technology. Time to go LED.
3. Distribute said lanterns--in this case, one goes by Tom's side of the bed (for puzzles), one sits in the kitchen, the other two are set in the living room, though they can move around a lot.
4. Pull out a gallon of water to put on the kitchen counter (we keep eight jugs filled). NO using water from the faucets. We're on a well/pump system (which doesn't work without power) and we save all the water that's already in the house pipes for flushing a single toilet downstairs--only every so often, if you get my drift. This time it really paid off in that we never had to pour water into it to flush--nor did we have to melt snow for that purpose. We're getting good at this part!
5. Assess the wood situation. This time, not so great. We had about a day's worth of heat for the living room stored up. Everything else was outside buried in snow--i.e., frozen and wet. We'd have to figure out something.
6. Remember to keep fridge/freezer access to minimum. But, with all the snow outside, and overnight temps in the 20s, keeping things cold is usually not a problem. This outage--three days--meant that we really didn't have to move the food. One advantage of being a vegetarian?--no meat to go stinky.
6. Call PG&E. We waited til morning, this time. We knew they knew. No sense in calling until they could get crews out for assessment.
7. Plug in the old, coiled-cord princess phone. The cordless ones don't work without power, of course. And, this time, the phone line was still functional. We try to save to cell phones for when we're away from home, since the only way to charge them is in the car. Sometimes, one of us takes some reading or puzzles out to the Suby and sits while phones or a laptops or e-readers charge.
8. Schedule? Do we have to get out for some reason? Does Tom need to find an internet cafe to work? In this case, we were essentially snowed in, at first, although we can always chain up to get out to Greenhorn, where the county plows. But we have this amazing neighbor who usually gets around to plowing everyone out after a day or two. For us, it wasn't necessary to leave until Saturday, when we were scheduled to help with a Hospitality House fundraiser. By then, Scott had plowed, but, due to more snowfall, we still needed chains to get out. Still, no worries there.
9. Other stuff. I had all of my jeans and sweats half-dried in the dryer, not to mention a wet washer-load I'd forgotten about that afternoon. I laid the pants out to finish drying (I hoped). We used the jug water to wash our hair before the Saturday event. Drying hair is tougher. I sat in front of the wood stove for a couple of hours. It was all wild and weird, but dry by the time we had to leave. Even the jeans were wearable.
Probably the trickiest problem we had this time, was that wood issue. The maul/wedge system I had been using to give us a pile of usable wood (which was all but gone) was not up to splitting the thickest oak logs (of which we have many), and we had just been lazy about hauling out the chainsaw to finish it. So, I went foraging on the property early Saturday morning and found a bunch of twigs and old lumber from defunct furniture I had disassembled--all wet/frozen. Picture me, crunching around in the snow, tugging on downed branches and digging through a big, snow-covered scrap lumber pile. Still, with about a month's-worth of newspaper, we were able to get the fire roaring well enough to actually burn the wet wood and also some of those really fat, unsplit logs. I think we might have come close to Eagle Scout-level fire-wizard status! Of course, it takes constant attention. Not that much else gets done. We kept the living room in the mid-sixties. The rest of that floor (including the kitchen) hovers in the mid-fifties, while downstairs (bedrooms, studio) it's about 45. We mostly stay upstairs.
Our activities during these power vacations are reading, puzzling and knitting. And eating. The kitchen stove is propane, so we can cook, or make popcorn. Fortunately, it was a long weekend and Tom didn't have urgent work to do, so he could chill at home.
When we contacted the PG&E outage recording on Friday morning, it had no specific predictions other than to tell us to prepare for "2 to 4 days" of no service. In the end, it was nearly three days. Not too bad, really, atc. We were just getting ready to go out to the movies and dinner (evenings are the most depressing times to be at home) when, around 5pm Sunday, the lights, furnace, fridge and TV all popped back on. Cacophony! We went out, anyway, but extra happy knowing we could flick a light on when we returned.
By the by, the movie, Unknown, was about a "B", in our estimation. I think we've been spoiled by the Bourne movies in this genre. Stupid car chases. Also, as an aside, our 41st wedding anniversary was the next day, Monday. We went out to Diego's for some lovely Latin American fare. 41 years?!! Yikes!
Anyhoo, there's another big Canadian storm bearing down on us as I write. It should begin this evening, which is why there was the distinctive sound of a chainsaw heard in our yard after lunch..
