Saturday, February 16, 2013

The Storm


You may not have heard, but there was something of a storm last week. I live in New England. Blizzards are nothing new to me. I’ve driven in them, I’ve shoveled out from them, I’ve spent countless hours staring out the window at cars skidding around the corner. And I can say that in my twenty six and a half years, I have never seen one this bad.

For example, this is a visual representation of my driveway the next morning, a Saturday:


You think it just looks like a white square? That’s because it’s buried under two feet of snow! A snow shoveling service came to clean it out Sunday afternoon. And you might think that being snowed in isn’t an altogether bad thing. It wouldn’t have been if the power hadn’t gone out.

At about eight p.m., I noticed the lights flickering. I cringed every time it happened, until nine twenty when the power shut off completely. Earlier in the night I even tweeted about how I’d better shut down my computer in case of a power outage, but I did so to give myself the night off from editing, not because I believed something would actually happen.

No power, no television, no internet—I’ve dealt with that before. My posts were all set up for the week and I didn’t absolutely need to write during the weekend. But there’s one tiny problem when the power goes out in the winter: there’s no heat. I spent most of the weekend buried under two blankets, two quilts, and two cats.

So that was an adventure. And by adventure I mean punch to the face. The power didn’t come back on until two o’clock on Sunday, at which point I had to shovel out the end of the recently plowed driveway because the snowplows clearing the street kept burying it.

Winter can be over now please.

7 comments:

  1. Sorry you had to go through that. It looks and sound awful.

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  2. When I was... younger than you (I'm not remembering exactly), we had a big ice storm and transformers blew up all over the city. We were without power for a week, because, as it turned out, we were the only house on our grid (long story (yes, there is an actual story)). A week.

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  3. Wow. That's when it's good to have a fireplace. I slept by ours once during a bad ice storm with no power.

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  4. I'm so sorry. I'm glad you're through it, though.

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  5. I'm very sorry to hear about all of this. Here in Central California it lightly snows once per decade. Otherwise it simply gets dreary, overcast, foggy or rainy. The reason I don't complain about our mild winter is due to the fact that I realize that summer is coming. I hate our 108 degree heat.
    I hope it gets better soon. Hang in there.

    -Jimmy
    http://jamesgarciajr.blogspot.com/

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  6. My mother received about three feet of snow but only lost power for a few hours. The power in my place never flickered.

    And I hate it when the town plows dump snow at the end of my driveway. They never seem to do it to my neighbors.

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  7. I've seen snow storms that delivered as much as that last big nor'easter. It's no fun getting through that.

    I remember during one, looking out the front window and not seeing a trace of the homes across the street.

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Please validate me.