Winter is here.

Hi all, No snow here ,but very cold. Gem , hope your power stays on, when Isabel hit here we were out of power and water for 13 days, but that was in the summer, my fear is having it go out during the cold months .I did buy a generater last year and hope I never have to use it. I remember once when I was very young we lived in a big farm house and the power went out at night. we drug two big matteress off the beds, to the front room where the fireplace was lite. piled on every blanket we had and 4 of us slept there.the power was on by morning. My bfriend has a camping stove and other camping gear,battery lights,and a battery TV.(he's never been camping!) so we could use that if we had to.I always buy extra canned food, bottled water,and batteries every winter just in case we do lose power. Hope you all stay safe and warm. Jenny

The power was going on and off about every ten to twenty minutes for about three hours last night. Matthew joked that it reminded him of one of the Simpsons episodes where Homer was watching a football game and the power went out... when it came back on the announcers were talking about how that was a once in a lifetime play that would never be repeated... but they had a replay "so watch carefully because it will never be shown again".. sure enough, just as they were about to play it the Simpson's power went off again and all you could hear in the darkness was Homer's "DOH". I got the candles and lit the kerosene lamp, so when our power went out at least we could see our way around. The main problem with it was, when it went out the first time I had a couple of hamburgers on *low* to cook for Matthew's supper (I just had a bowl of cereal)... so when the power came back on I turned the hamburgers up *high* and cooked them fast before losing power again. At one point (we normally turn the furnace on high to get the chill out of the air and then turn it off completely, because the house is well insulated and holds the heat in) after the power had been off for about 10 minutes and it was beginning to get a little chilly in the house (the strong bitterly cold winds were blowing at the front of the house where the livingroom is), I flipped the furnace on high as soon as the power came back on. We lost power about five more times after that, but by the third outing it had warmed up nicely in the house.

We always have bottled water here (I don't like the taste of the water in this house... even though we are only four places down the street from where my parents' home used to be), and we have canned food too, and crackers and cereal and milk. I had *just* made myself a cup of tea before the power went out the first time last night, so I had a hot cup of tea to help warm me a bit... along with snuggling under an afghan on the sofa in my pajamas and slippers.

I felt bad for Matthew having to go out four times to clear out more of the laneway. I did go out the second time he went out, to help a bit with the second section but my back couldn't take much of it and he told me to go inside and rest. Unfortunately he *had* to finish it last night... or get up at the crack of dawn this morning to try to do it before heading off to work... and he wasn't wild about that idea. Funny... he had been at his friend's home on Friday night, because I was in a lot of pain from my tooth and needed to take a painkiller that would knock me out. Then just went it was time for me to go pick him up from work on Saturday, the rain turned to wet snow, then sloppy slushy snow, etc... and by the time we got back home it was accumulating and really storming. So he had to call in and not go to work for his day of overtime yesterday. If it had started early enough on Saturday where we knew how bad it was going to become, he could have stayed at his friend's for the weekend and worked yesterday too. However, the down side to that... I would never have been able to shovel out the laneway myself and would be stranded here unable to pick him up from work tonight... or tomorrow night.... until it melted enough that I could just drive through it, as there were some really deep drifts in our laneway. So, there is an upside and a downside to it all. *shrug*

Gem

"jheller" wrote in message news:0NAFf.28$ snipped-for-privacy@news.uswest.net...