Thursday, February 19, 2009

Sunday, February 8, 2009

if there was a problem, yo i'll solve it


Here's the report on Ice Age '09:  Five days with no power or running water, baby wipes in lieu of baths, chopping firewood in the daylight, hazy herb-y games of Trivial Pursuit in front of the fireplace at night, nothing but NPR on the battery-powered radio and us grilling ham-and-cheese sammies over the fire.  




Woke up to this view of the backyard. "Look how pretty it is from inside the house where it's not fifteen degrees! I love ice storms!"



None of these branches are ordinarily curved like this; most of them broke off over the next few days from the weight of the ice. 








My new favorite word, accretion: "Growth of precipitation particles by collision of ice crystals with supercooled liquid droplets which freeze on impact." Meteorologists use it to describe the buildup of ice on objects, i.e. "we have a half inch of accretion on branches and power lines."


The accretion on my truck prevented me from opening the doors for two days.  



Hash Brown, trying to keep warm.  It was forty degrees inside our house with a fire going, fifteen to twenty degrees outside.  






Hey, thanks Garmin, not exactly the 7-11 I was expecting, but the gas is as good as any, even though it comes out of a pump from 1962 that takes forty-five minutes to deliver ten gallons.