Ice Storm

You may have noticed that Sunny and I have been noticably absent for the past few days. I can explain why in two simple words:

‘Ice Storm’.

Ok, let me explain to the people (like my family in the UK) exactly what an ice storm is.

Basically, the temperature suddenly plummets, and you get freezing rain. Within an incredibly short period of time (like half an hour) everything gets covered in an inch or so of ice.

Now that doesn’t sound too bad, but all that ice weighs a frigging ton, which means limbs fall from trees, powerlines break, and the cold plays havoc with all kinds of shit.

Basically, I spent the early hours of Tuesday morning listening to power transformers short out of explode one after another, trees falling over, tree limbs hitting the floor.

The next day it looked like a major tornado had been through the area. In fact, you know on those old war movies where there’s been a major battle in a forested area, and trees are snapped in half? It looked like that. Powerlines down in the middle of the road.

Basically, total devastation.

The most annoying this is that this happens where we live every single year. Basically, it’s cheaper to go out and repair the damage every year than to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place.

It particularly annoyed me because I’d been playing Morrowind for a couple hours and the power failed before I’d managed to save. Bastard.

Anyway, for us it was just a little adventure.

You see, our house is 100% electricity powered. No gas cooking or heating. In order not to freeze, Sunny and I spent the night at my stepdaughter’s house, who has a fireplace. It was fun, stayed up late playing poker, toasty warm by the fire.

Well, it was fun until my brother in law stopped by to check everyone was ok, and told us that 2500 electricity transformers where down in our area alone…and that it could be a week before power was restored.

We got lucky. Our main transformer was one of the first repaired, so we had power the following morning. My stepson still doesn’t have power and has been told that it’ll be December 24th before they get power back.

Anyway, although we got power back, our cable was out until a few hours ago, so no internet or TV, hence my absence.

Anyway, everything (at least for us) is back to normal now.

Normal service will resume when I can be bothered writing another post.