The Big Snow

We had about two feet of snow here during the big storm. I'll put up more pictures of the winter wonderland aspect of it once Kevin finally downloads his camera phone... I mostly stayed indoors and tried to keep cabin fevered boy, who had a cold, entertained, warm and dry.

That soon proved an impossible task (well, the warm part, anyway), as we lost power for several days. No power means no heat. I am really glad we had our camping lantern and a radio. I missed my little battery operated TV, but the whole digital conversion thing rendered it useless (and the digital versions are ridiculously expensive, so I won't be replacing it soon!) Luckily, we have a land line, and could at least call family members for news updates. And we had our small generator, which kept us from losing the entire contents of the refrigerator. We did a lot of reading by flashlight, and told stories, played games, and tried to make it into an adventure. Clever Bird did her bit to keep us smiling with her antics at the feeders. But by the end, it was wearing thin...

There were 36,000 homes without power in our county, and the Red Cross even set up an emergency shelter at the fire house here in our little village. If we had been faced with one more night without heat, we would have wound up there. It was pretty uncomfortable the last night. The least lucky villagers didn't get power back till March 2nd or 3rd-- that's 5 or 6 days with no heat! And the phone updates from Con Edison were worse than useless.

We were lucky to come through it without any damage. Trees were down all over the place, and many people weren't as lucky. On a smaller scale, we were also lucky to have on hand a new to Mikro toy that made sitting around in the dark a bit more palatable.



Needless to say, we are all hoping that was Winter's last hurrah.