winter fun

[chelidon]

We have power again, after four days without. All in all, we fared quite well -- no ice damage at all, the storm seemed to pass us right by, other than a few inches of snow and messy slush plus a pretty glazing of ice on all the trees. But others got hit very hard. Our electric cooperative described it as the worst and most damaging ice storm in their history of operation. We did lose power, along with 400,000 other people (and our electric coop only serves 500,000 people all told), and I was grateful that we're fairly self-sufficient when need be, at least for essentials. Which means heat, water, septic system, fridge, plus a few lights in the house, only if absolutely necessary. A gas cooktop is a very good thing. Internet would have been nice, but it's not worth dealing with satellite service just for occasional outages. As both land line phone and cell towers ran through their backup batteries and generators and dropped off the grid, it got very, very quiet, and our world got much smaller and much more immediate (the landlines came back after a day or two, but the cell towers just came back online late today). Suddenly, I remembered that we do in fact have radios in the house, and wow, they still work. Work got done according to the natural cycles of seasonally-abbreviated daylight, not when it was most convenient for us. In the worst-case, we could have retreated to the barn and gotten by with the wood stove and hand-pump water and lots of blankets, but really, it was kinda a cushy storm crisis, all things considered. There was good cheese, and good wine, and coffee, and warm soup, and a good bit of camaraderie and laughter.

Lots of little snippets of fun among the last few days -- dinner by oil lamp, storytelling by candlelight, and a heroic Dunkin Donuts employee who brought coffee over to her store in town from another store about 30 mi away with power, so she could sell yesterday's donuts and hot coffee to folks even if she had no power. You'd have to know New England to get why that was so important. It's not that DD coffee is any good -- it's that DD is like some kind of state religion, like Starbucks used to be in some big cities, with a zoning regulation seemingly stipulating a mandatory store every so many feet. The world can turn upside down, but if the Dunkin's is open, it'll be okay. So I went in and had a cuppa, even though I had a hand-grinder and a french press to make my own at home. Religious reasons, really, sacramental coffee -- about the same relationship to real coffee as sacramental wine is to a good Bordeaux, but that's not really the point. It's the spirit of the thing.

This was the longest we've had to go without line power, especially during Winter, and it's another good reminder that I'd like to be able to provide for even more of our energy needs, and without needing to use petro fuels of any kind. We'll get there...I have high hopes that one of the things that an Obama administration will bring is decent tax credits for microhydro, solar PV, solar hot water, and other forms of alternative energy. Aside from small-scale personal projects, there's already a big wind farm coming in to the next town over, another local power plant runs off of sawdust and wood chips from the local lumber mills, and there's some hydro power here and there.

Anyhow, nice to be back in the world, more or less, now to catch up a bit.

Comments

[morrigandaughtr.livejournal.com]

Welcome back! I was wondering how you were faring. Good to know y'all are all right.