So first...yesterday morning when we still had power, Jim was busy in the woodshed working on the next kitchen cabinet. Here he's glueing the maple front onto the bottom of the cabinet...
On the sides, he got the toe board areas cut out and blocking made...
Blocking made and attached to the back of the cabinet...
Sanding the maple fronts...
We lost power after lunch. As it is prone to do, power went off and came back on a couple times before going out completely. One of those times, it went on/off so fast that it tripped the arc fault breakers that we were required to have in certain areas of the house. So when the generator came on, part of the house was still without power until Jim realized that those breakers had tripped and reset them. It was another good test of a safety system!
As far as the weather, after getting about 3" of snow on Thursday, it changed to rain and ice. You can see our poor little tree was suffering. We got a lot of ice - the tree limbs were encased in at least 1/2" of ice!
The ice/rain on top of the snow caused the snow to curl around the edges of the roof - when this snow fell, instead of missing the overhang of the garage doors like normal, it hit the overhang and made a crazy loud noise!
Another angle...
Then the rain/ice switched to snow and we got another 3-4" of wet, heavy snow. Now look at the poor tree! You wonder how it can ever recover from this!
About 4:00 on Friday, the snow had stopped so Jim headed out to plow. As he headed down the driveway, this big tree limb just missed our trash cans and package box...
Jim noticed that cars were turning around in our driveway - when he got to the end, he could see why. This big tree fell from the neighbor's property onto the road just down from our driveway. The city had already put road closed signs at the end of our street. This guy was trying to get through - turned around in our driveway, backed up to let his wife out so she could get to her brother's house.
Jim, being the good guy that he is, spent a good chunk of the time trying to clear this tree from the road so the crews wouldn't have to and people who lived down the road could get by. Although as he was doing it, another tree fell.
The skies in the early evening were beautiful though - the sun came out and made the entire area glow. However, the winds kicked up too, causing even more issues for the frozen trees.
The entire area was hit extremely hard - there were over 90,000 customers without power. The scary part is the cold - with crews not even assigned to most areas and no estimated restoration time available, the temperatures are supposed to go below zero tonight. We can only pray that people find a safe, warm place to go.
It's now Saturday night and we just got home from church. Another day without utility power although the crews are working so hard in horribly frigid conditions. We stopped in at our local Stewart's to get milk and there were a few National Grid workers there - everyone in the store was stopping to say thanks for all their hard work! Many places have power back on but we still are running on generator power. Plus our internet has been down all day again - it's up now so I'm trying to quickly get the blog posted!
We even got an alert on our phones that National Grid had brought dry ice to the fire station in Corinth for people to use to keep their food cold. How wonderful!
Since we are running on generator power and we weren't sure how long that would continue, we are being very cautious with any unnecessary power usage. Jim still was able to get some work done on the cabinet pieces though. He got all the blocking and millwork done and then put the first coat of polyurethane on...
Other pieces drying...
Jim even had a Craigslist sale today - some guy came and bought the ballasts that Jim had taken out of the shop fixtures and replaced with other ones.
Pictures don't capture how beautiful everything looked coated with thick ice and snow - even though it's hard to see the trees so bent over.
Our church is in downtown Saratoga Springs and it's just a few miles south of us but always a noticeable difference in weather because of the difference in elevation from the mountains. But this tree in the courtyard was just beautiful encased in ice.
We are beyond grateful that we are safe and warm through this bad winter storm. Thanks for everyone's thoughts!
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| High 22/Low -4 |
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