Snowy, Snowy Day

The weather people were right. It snowed!

Larry had collected our wood stepladders to get ready to take to booths; now they make  pretty cool snow sculpture.

And snowed and snowed, until in the end I think there's about 12 inches of wet white stuff out there. It's incredibly beautiful, so bright it almost hurts the eyes.

Of course, with a wet, heavy snow like this, the power is bound to go out. We've been fortunate this winter with no power outages, until today. Sometimes during the night the electricity went off, and when I called to report it the projected restore time was 11:00am tomorrow. We were prepared for it to be off, though--we put about 20 gallon jugs of water in the cellar, took our showers before going to bed, set up the morning's coffee and tea things, rounded up flashlights and made sure the kerosene lamps were full.  We also thought about what things we could get into if the power was out.

Free gas is a real blessing in an outage. Our cookstove, heat, and refrigerator run on gas so the only inconveniences are lack of lights, and the water not running. One day we'll get one of those natural gas generators and we won't even notice when the lights go out.

We still had plenty to do. Washing dishes takes a little more time, and Larry had a date with the snow shovel. I had a huge pile of papers that needed to be sorted and filed so I got that out of the way,

and then I worked on getting the polyurethane coat on the cabinet I painted yesterday and on the doors for it that Larry had stripped and stained.

He's already started stripping the door on the new pantry cupboard so I reckon I'll be painting it too in the near future.

Both of us enjoyed watching the birds at the feeders.

There must have been over 50 out there, and I counted 12 male cardinals at one time.

Love that little snowbird sitting right on top!

The feeders were busy, busy. I was glad we'd bought more seed when we were in town the other day because they are really going through it.

I never tire of looking at the snow.

When it was getting dark I started the process of lighting lamps and candles while Larry built a fire in the fireplace. I noticed that some of the oil lamps needed their wicks trimmed so I did that before lighting them. We'd just settled in by the fire, wondering what do next with the house being so dim, when, voila! The lights came on!

Tomorrow Larry will get out the tractor, and I hope he'll be able to get the driveway clear enough for us to get out to town. We'll see. With temperatures predicted to be below zero tonight, the snow will freeze, and I am not sure how easy it will be to clear. A foot of snow is a lot to move off a 1/4 mile long road that is all uphill. If he can't get it done, I reckon we'll just wait for the weekend's warmer temperatures to do the job.

I am worried about that warming trend, though. Flooding was already happening before this storm. I only hope those high waters have a chance to recede before this new snow melts. For those of you along creeks and rivers, I'll be thinking of you and hoping you stay high and dry.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.