I'm Back!

Yes, it's true we survived the great ice storm of 2008! Wow what a storm it was too!
I have many more pictures to share but this one will have to do for now.

I have to admit that I was not expecting the storm to be as bad as it was and I would have rather had snow over all this ice anyday.

I have counted my blessings repeatedly over the past several days knowing that we and those we love were able to ride out this storm without much incident.

So here my personal account.

Thursday morning I took the kids to school as usual and it was already rain mixing with sleet making some of the back roads slick. I kept an eye on the weather outside as well as the news on TV and it wasn't long before the stairs and deck were starting to get a slight glaze on them.

I went to get Kenzie out of Kindergarten at 10:45. The main roads were in good shape but the back roads were still slick in spots. Going on Motherly instinct I decided to pull Becca out of school too, why go out into the messy weather again in a couple of hours. It wasn't going to get better outside.The news was saying to was going to last all night into Friday at noon. Becca was suprised to see me but I think maybe a little secretly pleased to get to leave early. After getting everyone settled at home I checked the news to see that they were closing the school early. Ahh my instincts are pretty good after all. Dom got home safely that night saying the road crews were doing a good job and the roads were in good shape.

I was just happy to have everyone at home.

Not long after he got home I let the dogs out and I could here the sleet coming down like crazy. The rest of our evening continued as normal and sometime after 11 the electricity went out. We kinda expected this. It's not the first time we had lost electricity because of a little ice. Little did we know what was going on outside.

Around 2am Dom and I both had gotten up to use the bathroom and after getting into bed again, suddenly we heard a loud creaking, crackling and crashing noise outside. Branches were starting to fall under the weight of the ice. This couldn't be good. The noise sent the girls rushing into our bedroom where they spent the rest of the night in our bed. No one got a lot of sleep from that point on. The eerily quiet night was repeatedly broken by the crashing of branches and the shattering of icicles. When your home is surrounded by trees this is a very scary sound as you wonder if the creaking is going to send a branch crashing through your roof!

Not suprisingly we were up early on Friday morning and looked outside to find the world covered in ice. Branches littered the ground everywhere and continued to fall randomly throughout the morning. Trees and branches were bent over everywhere under the weight of the ice but at the same time it was incredibly beautiful, like a sparkly fairy wonderland.

I stared out the window feeling a large range of emotions run through me, awe at the beauty, sadness at the broken and bent trees and concern. This wasn't going to be few hours of no electricity this was big. Did the whole state look like this??

Lucky for us we have a generator and when we built the house we had a panel put in so basically we plug in the generator and are good to go. We had heat, water (hot showers), refrigerator and few outlets in the kitchen- (Coffee!) as well as several outlets in the living room which meant TV,DVD, and playstation. We had no cable or internet though and my only source of news was the radio and the scanner. Basically we were very comfortable though Kenzie really missed the internet! I missed being able to blog since I had something to blog about! We passed the time playing games both on the playstation and regular board games, our elves brought us two new games too which was helpful! Watching Christmas movies was fun too. Reading (for me anyway) was a popular pastime too. Photography kept Dom and I busy also , but I didn't feel real safe being outside. Branches and ice were still falling. Friday afternoon the sun actually came out and I ventured outside again but now the ice was melting and it was raining from the trees. In some cases pretty big chunks!

Sunday afternoon we finally got the electricity back but still no cable or internet. Today we have cable and internet back. There is no school for much of the state including us. There is still a lot of people without power and a lot of schools are being used as shelters. Everything is getting back to normal for us. My parents are still without electricity but they have a generator too so they are warm.

I will be posting more pictures soon - hopefully later today!