Happy New Year

Yes, the title isn't very original but it is another year, though if you think about it, whomever came up with this particular calendar the Greeks or Egyptians, I don't remember which, it's all arbitrary. Why can't the first of the year be on the winter solstice, or summer? or an equinox? But as it stands we are now into the evening (maybe it was Gregorian?) of the sixth day of the new year and baby, it's cold outside. At the moment it's 23.9 F but 2 nights ago it dropped to -5.3, yes winter is upon us, and has been for about a week.

We had a green Christmas, the temperatures all December had been in the mid 30's to low 40's. Snow didn't really show up till several days later and that brought an unexpected 8 inches with rain on top which turned everything icy as the temperatures finally dropped into the 20s. The forecasters couldn't make up their minds whether we were getting 1-4 inches, 2-5, or 8-12. And the winds were so crazy we really had no idea what we were getting till it was all over the next day.

Speaking of winds though, the night before Christmas Eve the winds really picked up within a rainstorm we were getting while the southern part of the country was getting hit with deadly tornadoes. While we didn't get hit by tornadoes, the winds gusted up to 60 mph all over the state and at 3:10 am Christmas Eve morning, our power went out. As the day went on more and more power outages occurred, trees were down all over the northern part of the state. Estimated restoration of power was Monday night the 28th at 11:30 pm. Yikes. More than 100,000 were without power and all but 2 crews were sent home for the long holiday weekend. Consumer's Energy had to hire crews from out of state.

But unlike the majority of people around here, we had a generator.

the generator that saved Christmas

We bought it one summer when a longer than a day outage happened before. With my sister and her boyfriend (BF) visiting, it wasn't the best time for this to happen, and on a holiday weekend! But Hal and BF went out and got 10 gallons of gas, borrowed his parent's old small generator to set up at Mrs J's next door and we just rolled with it. Ours was big enough that we only had to trip some breakers when it came to using the shower (which ran the well pump). If the chest freezers came on at the same time, the whole house would shut off. Unfortunately, for Mrs J, the small generator meant she could have either heat and a few lights, or the well pump and running water. I went over a couple times a day to flip breakers for her to flush toilets, get drinking water to make coffee, etc. It is definitely a Christmas we will remember.

The power was actually restored about 3 pm on Sunday, the 27th. We were running on generator a total of 3 days, 11 hours, and 55 minutes. The numbers are courtesy of the power company.

I will post more photos over the next few days. We didn't take a lot being as we were running about with generators, etc, but there are a few. But for now, I am off to bed to read.