Snowmageddon 2012

 Okay. So picking up from my last post which was so cute and happy and sentimental over the fresh powder and a snow day at home with my honey...well, let's just say that I'm so over it. At first, the snow was pretty. I admired the intense blue-ness of it out our kitchen window as night set in and I loved the whole cozy-cuddle factor it inspired. And then...excuse my language...sh*t went downhill rapidly from there. First of all, approximately an hour after snapping this blue-snow picture, the power went out. Which was okay...at first. I'm from the country, yo. I can deal with a power outage. Instead of griping about it, we simply made use of the hot water still in the tank by taking our showers by candlelight, then called it an early night.

 But in the morning, we woke up to this. Notice something wrong? Yeah, my butterfly bush (which wasn't my favorite plant, I admit) looks like Mike Tyson beat it up somewhere between 10pm the night before and 8am the next morning. It's so sad! And since we STILL had no power, instead of tuning into the morning news to see what was going on, we were forced to entertain ourselves by heading out to inspect our own damage.

 Overnight there must have been some pretty terrible freezing rain because Denny's truck looked like someone had replaced it with a rippled glass version. It was entirely encrusted in ice.

 (FMF is a race brand, by the way, and Denny's subtle rebellion against having to drive a Ford.)

 And Denny's truck wasn't the only thing totally covered in ice. Check out our poor Japanese maple and our arborvitaes. Then, the day continued to get worse, as more freezing rain moved in (still no power, by the way). Our trees went from iced-over to iced-obese.

 What started out as a couple of centimeters of ice quickly turned into an inch-plus!

 Branches began dragging and, in the case of our Baby Tree (which is what I call the rowan we planted this fall), the entire then practically bent in half.

 As Denny worked in his office, I kept myself busy by carefully breaking all of the ice off our Baby Tree. Of course, it wasn't that hard because entire chunks came off at once, sometimes retaining an oddly branch-like shape.

 By the time I was done, both the Baby Tree and the maple looked so much better. I swear that I could practically hear their whispery, little tree-voices thanking me.

 As the day wore on and we still had no power, we did the best we could to stay busy and to feed ourselves. You never realize how much you depend on electricity for good food until it's gone. As it was, we made do with sandwiches for lunch then soup heated on our barbecue at night. Oh, and hot chocolate, of course.

 I cannot even express to you how freaking cold it was in our house. Eventually we retreated to Denny's office since it was the smallest room and thereby the warmest. A couple of groups of candles provided light and Denny and I sat down to read for a while until we thankfully retreated to bed (where we slept under a total of six blankets and still froze).

 We woke up early the next morning to (still no power and) what sounded like breaking glass outside. The wind was kicking up pretty good, but we were really grateful to see that none of our windows were actually broken; it was just ice falling from the trees and shattering on the ground like broken bottles. Nice, huh?

 We were actually pretty lucky. Wait...make that extremely, incredibly blessed. Because while we did lose some pretty good-sized branches off of our trees, we didn't incur any major damages. The two large branches that did fall missed both Denny's truck and our large window, and nothing damaged our roof. Also, our trees actually survived the storm, which it turns out was a miracle in and of itself. Because as the roads began to get less terrible and we began to get more cabin-fevery (three days of snowed-in, power-out-ness will do that to ya), we both ventured out of the house. After working to de-ice his car for nearly an hour, Denny left to go to his real office and I left to charge my laptop and cellphone at the nearest Panera (and to eat hot food and have real coffee, let's be honest). 

As I drove down the road, I was sad to see sights such as these EVERYWHERE. I think most people's houses made it through in one piece (not counting all the fridges full of spoiled food, of course) but the trees took a major beating. It looked like some nasty giant had gone around and just stripped all the trees of their limbs. Looking at the damage that was done to everyone else's trees, I feel incredibly blessed that ours (which we were just gushing about a few days before the storm hit) survived. 


Anyway, this was all to say that Snowmageddon sucked. And to say that LA (you know, the one in southern California where the worst weather conditions include incessant sunshine and the occasional sprinkle?), and which had the nerve to call us "clueless wimps," can suck it. Hear me, Los Angeles Times? I'm personally inviting you to make a trip up here and SUCK IT. 


Ahem. That is all. 


PS: We did eventually get our power back. After living without warm food or water for three days in a house that never got warmer than 44 degrees, we're very grateful for it, too. It makes us much less grouchy. -A