Snow Pictures!!!

Despite the mountains of snow that we have had, it's been looking less than pristine. I suspect that all the blasting and rock crushing behind us is coating everything with a barely discernable film of dust. Anyway, a few inches of snow overnight freshened up the neighborhood.


This is across the street.


And this is to the left out our front door.

Another Snow Day

Whew. So here we are again, drifting through another snow day. T seems to be feeling well which is a quite a relief after the series of colds/bugs he has had since school started again. E is downstairs quibbling with T over the next activity to play. I suspect that I need to print out a mid-morning schedule.  Thank heavens for Boardmaker!

I must say, never underestimate the power of a simple toy for a child. I picked up a tally counter for the little guy. I gave it to him as a "snow day treat" and he has been counting everything in sight. My original plan was to use the counter as a motivator to eat, but it's become much bigger than that. This morning he counted up the number of "book cubes" we have as well as items of furniture and socks on the floor.

Papa needs to blow snow out of the drive way, after about five inches our pissy snow thrower chokes.

Just when I thought I could get my little guy back to school, we have a snow day! This is some serious s***! The folks on the weather channel have lost their grip with reality. They are wild-eyed annd caffinated. The snow here fell in thick fat flakes and the wind rattled the windows. Tennisfiend didn't even bother going to work, instead he shoveled snow every four hours since our pissy snow thrower couldn't handle more than a few inches at a time.

Check out this awesome time-lapse taken from our nearby resort town of North Hampton:




Wow! And thanks to cameratown for posting!

Snowman

This is our first snowman since our first winter in Merrimack. Tyoma was actually pretty excited about the whole process and helped assemble the snowman's face. His mouth is a red bell pepper slice and yes, the neckerchief is a JC Penney kitchen towel. A far cry from the blank stare he gave to snowman number one when he was two and a half!



If you look to the right behind T, you can see his little line of snowballs. It's still more fun to line them up rather than throw them!

Snow!

Well, here we go! the first snow day of the season. It's been terribly windy and TF has been struggling in the gusts to keep our driveway clear, primarily so we can get Tyoma out to play tomorrow! The aquarium sickness lingers, but T is recovering nicely.




The cool time lapse is by MPCentauri, not us. It's awesome when folks take the time to make such cool videos!Please note-the wind was crazy! It swept all the snow out of our driveway for us! Our neighbors were not so lucky, most of it drifted in a huge V by their porch.

More Snow!!!

Yesterday it was in the sixties and lovely. I took the squirmy guy out to the park and we seemed to spend most of the day outside. Lovely weather! Then BAM!  Snow again! Looks like eight inches at least. I told Tennisfiend that there's no way I'm shoveling the driveway for him today! Sheesh! Some really good news came in yesterday. Tyoma's speech therapist called and said that Tyoma is 100% caught up with his peers and no longer needs therapy! Yay!!!!

OMG, SNOW!!!

I just shoveled 195 cubic feet of snow. Gasp.
 
 We are the only people on the street without a snow blower. We were planning to get one, but decided to wait until the end of the season sale. Hah! Near the road, the snow was above my knees and heavy as cement. It's wetter than the sweet, fluffy flakes near the garage. As I labored, the wind blew sheets of the stuff right to our doorstep, whisking shovelfulls back into my face during gusts as I dug.

Still love it here!

Snow Again

Why do snowstorms always occur on Wednesdays? It was predicted that we'd get 5-8 inches today. I swear we got fourteen.  The snow started up before dawn, fluffy sweet stuff, falling gently. I started shoveling at 10:30 and I swear six inches had fallen already (news said three). When I left to pick Tyoma up from preschool at noon the snow was wafting down in big white sheets. The roads were so blanketed in snow as to be indiscernible from the landscape. 

Am I grateful that preschool is within walking distance? You bet! Not that I'd walk. Anyway, Tyoma fell asleep like an angel so I had plenty of time to shovel snow. What work!  A third of the way through I called Tennisfiend and asked him to pick up a snow blower on the way home! Actually, the problem isn't the snow, which is rather pleasant to shovel, it's the ice beneath. I slipped and slipped as I struggled to move the increasing bulk of snow out of the driveway. After working for almost an hour, a neighbor with a snow blower finished up for me. Gratitude!  Especially since I was getting tired of shoving  all the snow over to Tennisfiend's side of the driveway!

Minus 5!!!

Holy Crap! This morning it was minus five degrees!!! I don't think I have ever experienced such cold! When I dropped Tyoma off at preschool today I could feel my nose hairs freezing. The air felt dry, brittle.  My jacket crinkled and crunched when I stepped outside. Lord.

Brrrr! Spent the rest of the morning shopping at Sam's and Market Basket (NH's Albertson's, but with better prices and service). Wrapped Tyoma's Christmas presents: Moonsand, play dough, plastic letters and numbers. E and I already exchanged gifts: I got him a generator and firewood. He bought me a dozen D batteries, two flashlights, twelve canisters of propane and 50 feet of extension cord. How romantic!!!! For our anniversary we plan to gift each other with voltage inverter and car batteries. :)

Dramatic Weather!

Check out this eeire pic I snapped from our front window! That's the pond across the street from us! The snow has been falling so heavily, it's unbelievable to a Southern New Mexico native. Snow sounds like tiny fingernails rapping on the windows. I love this cold and dramatic weather!



I also took a picture overlooking our back porch. Do you see that snow accumulation? All of it in a day! That's almost 14 inches! Cool!

And Happy 28 months, Tyoma!

The Ice Storm Narrative, Part One

My narrative starts on Thursday night, the night our power went out.

 

After being sick (again) during the long Thanksgiving weekend, Tennisfiend and I were looking forward to a three day weekend and some rest. He was exhausted by the deadlines he’d had to make plus being sick. I still recovering from the flu (the real thing!) I got last week. Rest and relaxation was all we talked about Thursday evening.  Heh. Thursday night was less than restful.

 

Staggering home from work regular time, Tennisfiend was dazzled by the storm. He related how his car had become encased in ice prior to leaving work and how the wind and ice pellets bombarded him on the way home. I don’t even recall our dinner or bedtime, but the air felt electric. It was a dreadful night for sleeping, with thundering wind and rolling power outages. This in itself was not so bad, but the battery back up on the computer would screech every time power dropped off, jolting us awake. After the third power drop off, I drug myself into the computer room to switch off the power outage alarm. Twenty minutes later I was back again, since I managed to press a wrong button first time.

 

Sometime around 2am, the power went off for real. We were alerted to the situation by Tyoma’s squalls. He woke without his nightlight, panicked and wailed. I took stock of our power outage supplies: we had two flashlights, and no candles. One flashlight had no batteries and we had no replacements. Talk about being unprepared.

 

However, we did have a bit of luck. I wanted candeliers for the windows to make our house festive for the holidays, but I was too cheap to drop $65 for nine “electric candles”. Instead, I bought a bunch of battery powered candeliers for $16. Let me tell you, being cheap was propitious. We used the heck out of those candles! They were perfect nightlights for Tyoma and a quite suitable tiny flashlight for walking around. 

 

Anyway, back to our drama. At 3:00 a.m., a quantity of our six smoke alarms started chirping. Although they are directly wired into the house’s electricity, these things blast a piercing tone every three to five minutes when their back up battery is low. The only way to quiet them is to replace or remove the battery. I was puzzled. Why were they chirping now? And which ones were chirping? With a candelier in one hand and a battery in another , I stood on a kitchen chair under an alarm waiting for it to chirp only to hear one chirp somewhere else. I spent fifteen minutes chasing detector beeps before I could locate a chirping detector, since they chirped at different times and the acoustics of the house obscured locations. Confounding the situation, I also had a limited number (3!) of fresh batteries. This was fine, except the damn detectors chirped even without a battery--something that didn’t happen when the power was on! So, between educated guesses and trial and error, I managed to quiet all of the offending smoke detectors and went back to sleep.

 

If you could call it sleep. It was a strange half-awake sensation, hypnogogic. Did I dream the barrage of crackles, hisses and pops or were the walls beneath us splintering and collapsing? I lapsed into one of those eternal falling dreams, where the terror of the fall thrusts you in and out of sleep; you wake to the safety of your bedroom and slip back into the falling house nightmare only to wake again. It seemed like no sleep at all.

 

We stumbled out of bed at six thirty. I turned up the hot water heater and lamented not replenishing our supplies of propane for our camp stove or lantern. A morning without tea! Horrors! Tennisfiend noticed that a small tree fell in the back went outside to investigate. I called the power company. In retrospect, it was amazing that the phones were still working. After a brief hold, a recorded voice informed me that “damage was widespread” and that we could be without power “for several days.” I was in too much shock to be alarmed. E returned from outside, a few small trees fell and a multitude of sizable branches were strewn about. I quickly dressed and headed out to the store. I was uncertain if anything was open, but if the power was out for a few days, a single flashlight and a handful of candeliers was not going to make it.

 

The roads were icy, but passable. However, the fallen trees made driving tricky. I counted three trees down on the way to our closest store, which, miraculously, was open. I was soooo happy to see the brave folks at our local Shaw’s fueling generators and running their store. My heart soared! If they were open, Home Depot would be open too.  I just might be able to buy some propane canisters! I swiftly scooped up a horde of D and AA batteries. I didn’t even look at the prices! Dura logs, overpriced firewood, butane lighters, and a smattering of canned goods rounded out my purchases.

 

In line I kidded a red haired fellow in line in front of me about the quantity of bagged ice he was buying.  Dressed in heavy plaid flannel, he was slight, fortyish, and furtive looking; his red beard was just starting to go gnarly. I regretted my teasing immediately.  He was one of those unusually earnest folks who don’t get jokes easily. With intense seriousness, he said that he would need it to keep his refrigerated goods cold. I made some stupid comment about ice being everywhere. He frowned, reiterated his comment and looked at me with such sobriety that it wiped the smile off my face. He could have been a dick and been rude to me, ignored me or gotten offended, instead he was dead serious—and even concerned for me. I was struck dumb. His composure and solemnity was infectious. While he focused all his grim energy onto loading ice onto the checkout carousel, I pulled out of line and started loading my cart with ice. The assemblage of other shoppers present eyed me vigilantly. I looked like an aging soccer mom, not a survivalist, so they followed suit. As I left, I heard a Shaw’s employee stating, “Sorry, this is the last of the ice.”

 

I felt quite proud of my cache, imagining that Home Depot would be a frenzy of activity. Certainly, I was the sole purchaser of the last available D batteries in New Hampshire. I even threw a blanket over my cache to hide it from jealous eyes. Dodging downed trees and inauspiciously strewn branches, I chugged the three miles to the Depot. The mostly empty parking lot surprised me. Only a few scattered shoppers were picking up supplies—power cords and the last of the electric generators. I grabbed a handful of flashlights and all but two remaining propane tanks and hustled to the check out.  While I stood in line, the power came back on. I was flooded with disappointment. A power outage, how romantic!!! I left one propane tank behind as a courtesy to the fellow at the end of line and called Tennisfiend. No, the power was not back on, yes, I would I pick up coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts.

 

The day passed swiftly from then. Frantic phone calls to my mom in Las Cruces revealed that a cold snap was coming our way and that the power outage was quite serious, might take up to a week to resolve. The house became quite cold, quite fast. Half the Dura logs were consumed during the day. A dozen tea candles would have warmed us more. With temperatures dropping to near 9 degrees at night, we moved Tyoma’s crib into our room. I taped blankets and quilts over the windows and repeatedly filled our tub with hot water to warm up our room. Despite these efforts, at seven p.m. our bedroom temperature was barely 50 degrees.

 

To make matters worse, Tennisfiend discovered that our basement was inexplicably beginning to flood. We were deluged by rains over the summer and our damn sump pump never clicked on. Now, wet fingers of concrete crept across the basement. Before turning in for the evening, I took a final paranoid trip down the basement, not really expecting anything. I was shocked to find that the oozing moisture was turning into small puddles. I charged up the stairs, alerting Tennisfiend. Warm and toasty in bed, he didn’t want to bother, but I reminded him that ten minutes of moving stuff around now was much better than doing the same in the middle of the night. ‘Cause you know one of us (me) would wake up and check.

To be continued...

 

 

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December Icestorm 2008

I imagine that this date will go down in record books for the power outages associated with it. I am legitimately writing this entry late, since our power went out for one entire week! I've got a good deal to write, and I'm trying not to get too busy or too sick to get it all online, so, I'll post in chunks. First, of course, the pictures I snapped Friday morning. I took them on a whim, not realizing the extent of the damage to New Hampshire.
 
One of the trees on our property that went down overnight. E chopped it up for firewood. It's difficult to see, but many grass blades are sheathed in ice.


Our larger trees in the backyard, ice covered and a little bit creaky. I later discovered that it only takes a half inch of ice accumulation on branches/foliage to bring down a tree. The one that wiped out our power lines was about the size of the pine tree in the middle.

  The beauty of an ice storm deceives. I always thought that storms that caused major outages required mountains of snow. Everything looked like a fairyland this morning. You'd never realize how damaging it was until you moved away from the house--branches strewn everywhere, trees bent over or snapped in half, bushes completely collapsed--many roads were impassible.

 I reget that I didn't take more pictures of the neighborhood debris. Lawns were littered with dozens of clumps of pine branches like this. We could have made a good sized Christmas tree from all the ones on our property.

 A shot of the thicket behind our house. If anyone had to crunch through this stuff to fix a line, they'd have some very hard work ahead of them.

Hail Storm

I passed a few wonderfully pleasant hours with Ewbliette today, ostensibly to help decorate for tomorrow’s monster wedding reception. Instead, we had an amiable gabfest and I trundled home to spend a quiet evening with Tennisfiend. Baby fell asleep early and easily, so the two of us read drowsily until the weather turned really bad.

I suppose the ordeal originated with sharp, gusting wind. Then again, house-shaking wind is so commonplace; we ignored it. When I heard the first few “pops,” I was curious but unfazed, until I realized what it was—hail! As the pops became bangs, I raced out into the storm to pull my precious SUV into our garage, nearly taking out a portion of wall and barely missing Tennisfiend’s feet.

The instant I turned off the engine, the hail transformed into a solid sheet of water, a heavy and violent deluge. We had only an instant to think of all that needed to be done to rescue our sunroom from an unprecedented flood. TF swiftly sealed the backdoor with duct-tape as I wrangled the industrial mop bucket into position and tossed last weeks flood towels on the floor. Donning my dad’s gortex jacket, TF situated our water transfer pump out the porch window to prevent water from inundating the sunroom via the dog door. I snapped the above picture right before water began to slither in through the back door, despite the duct taping.

Actually, we’ve endured worse downpours. The water only rose two inches above our back door, dampening but not soaking the sunroom. Plus, not a drop seeped in from the dog door. On an even brighter note, I won’t have to water my garden for a week!

Snowday!

I woke up this morning to about three inches of snow. It was completely unbelievable. I should have taken a photo of our house and yard. As it was, Mom volunteered to babysit for us while Tennisfiend and I raced off to the mountains to use our new Nikon. We discovered that the snow was uncharacteristically limited to the lower elevations and that the mountains looked rather scruffy, except from a distance as seen in this shot by Tennisfiend. The two of us relished the outing since we have had so few since Tyoma was born. We wound up trekking the abandoned lot of a local landscaper taking pictures of his inventory of rocks and stone, making big plans for our backyard.

Buying A Pump

After spending three hours wringing out wet towels last night to drain the sunroom finally agreed that we needed to break down and buy a pump. I was inordinately excited about a trip to Lowes (yay shopping!) until I spent fifteen minutes standing around while Tennisfiend meticulously studied the pump assortment.

I dragged a white five gallon paint bucket over to the pump aisle and took a seat across from the display security camera system so I could entertain myself while TF satisfied his research instincts. Thirty minutes later, after some discussion, we left with a moderately priced pump that will hopefully suck out the next onslaught of flood waters. To commemorate my victory in the pump war (I've been campaigning for one since last summer), TF took my pic in the back yard. I'm eight and a half months pg!

As Predicted...

Well, that took longer than I expected. At 3:am I decided that the blurr near his neck just had to be his umbilical cord. Sigh.

 At 7:am, my sanity returned. Sheesh. Oh! And the sunroom flooded again! Water was six inches up the side of the house and an inch and a half deep in the house. So much for our new patio averting floodwaters. We don't have it too bad, though--the neighbor's chain link fence washed away. An arroyo sprung up on the periphery of their property; it looks like the Colorado River over there!

First Flood of The Season

We had our first mini-flood in the sunroom. I wasn't really paying attention to the rain, but it was wonderfully refreshing after weeks (month?!) of drought. I mopped the whole thing up with one of our sunroom towels. Hopefully the new patio we put un will keep the water out of the sunroom. Yay!

Hot, Hot, Hot

The heat is miserable. It's been over 100 degrees for half the month. I should have agreed with Tennisfiend when he suggested we put in refrigerated air this year. The humidity from the swamp cooler makes the house feel (and smell) like a jungle. Bleaugh.

Rainy Day

Today I celebrated my recovery from the tummy flu by fixing bacon and whole grain waffles for breakfast. The bacon smelled wonderful and tasted even better. Yum. Three days of soup and crackers and I feel like an inmate at Sing-Sing! What a life.

When I left for my job appointment, it started to rain. And then it started to hail. Hard. I feared for my recently replaced windshield. I feared for my fading windshield wipers. I even feared for my poor, failing car stereo. I arrived safely; my stereo did not. Sigh.

Anyway, no work for me. Columbus Day. D’oh! Since I already spent the gas money driving into town, I stopped at the nearby Wal-Mart. Waiting in the car for the rain/hail to subside, I was jolted by a tremendous thunk. A stray shopping cart had collided forcefully into the passenger side door. Minimal damage, except for rattled nerves.

Wal-Mart was overcrowded. I wondered if everyone else had forgotten the holiday and decided to make the most of being in this part of town as well. The lines were incredibly long and strangely silent; everyone seemed tense and preoccupied. As I wheeled groceries to my truck, the rain resumed with vigor. After unloading, I irritably hauled my cart to the closest corral, as if to make a point to the person whose stray cart startled me earlier. The rain fell in sheets as I drove home. It continued to pour as I pulled into the driveway, but it seemed friendlier than the Wal-Mart rain. Getting soaked was rather pleasant.