Ice Storm

We had a crazy weekend beginning with our power going out Thursday night. We had over a foot of snow and then the freezing rain came. Lots of freezing rain, for days. By Saturday morning there was over an inch of ice on everything. Early Saturday (about 3:30 am) it began to warm up a bit and rained hard. That's when the branches really started breaking, and all of the snow and ice started coming off the trees. The snow began to melt and slide off the roof in big heavy sheets that shook the ground when they hit. It was noisy, scary noisy. Aaron slept through the whole thing with ear plugs in. We talked to two of our neighbors, they both had moved their entire families to other (safer) areas of the house during this time.
Four big branches broke off on the tree in the chicken run.







The biggest branch that came down in our yard. Hood River is a mess right now, some areas have 30% of their trees down. Which is why it took so long for our power to be restored, lots of areas without power.


As the ice melted off the trees and power lines, it would hit the ground, shatter and dance across the icy snow.


From a power line


Shedding


Here's why our power was out. A tree fell across our neighbor's driveway and took the power line clean out with it. Another neighbor cleared the tree, got most of the branches off the line, and plowed the road so the power company could access it.


The other end of the line on our side of the street.


Best purchase ever - Aaron found these at the Rack for $45! We lived in our Sorels this week.






Beautiful glazed snow...


That was hard to walk on! You could get away with walking gently on top of it most steps, but occasionally you would break through and startle yourself.


There is so much snow right now, especially where it has come off the roof. There is even more since this was taken, I can easily look down into the gutters on the coop.


Regarding the power outage - which lasted from Thursday around 4:30 to Sunday at 4:00, not very fun. The biggest concern being with the food in our freezers that I had grown from seed, planted in the garden, watered all summer, then prepared into food. 6 months worth of labor that I didn't want to lose. I learned a few lessons with this experience. Keep the bulk of anything you really care about in your largest freezer. We had all our tomato sauce in the kitchen freezer, I had meant to move it into the big freezer but never got around to it. It was stacked all together, so it kept itself frozen, thankfully. If you have extra space in your freezer, fill it with frozen jugs of water to help keep it cold longer. We filled our refrigerator and refrigerator freezer with bags of snow after day 2. It did help. We didn't open the large freezer, which is in a cold room, and things stayed frozen solid.
I realized having a wood stove and a good supply of fire wood is something we should always have. We would have been so miserable if we hadn't been able to stay warm. Other than a few annoyances, like hauling in the chicken water every night (I'm spoiled with my thermostat controlled water heater), not showering, and the difficulties in cooking, we survived just fine. When the storm wasn't keeping us awake, the extra sleep was nice. I had to force myself to stay up until 8:30 last night and slept til 7! Tonight we are clean, happy and well fed, a good way to start out the work week.