Powerless

The last time we posted something it was about the fact that Hurricane Irene hadn't done us much damage. Unfortunately, that wasn't our last storm of the year. Our snow started accumulating on Saturday, October 29 around 11 am and Dad called in the early afternoon to see if we still had power. At that point, we did, but it didn't last much longer.

Our power went out at about 1:25 on Saturday afternoon and stayed out until 9:55 on Sunday night (32.5 hours). As of Friday evening there are still almost 8,000 people in the area without power, so I guess we were relatively lucky. The maple tree in our front yard, which had not lost any of its leaves when the snow hit, was relatively unlucky. It turns out that leaves provide a lot more surface area for snow to pile up on than branches alone. After the power went out we could hear cracks from all directions as branches broke under the weight of the snow. In the end, our tree lost major limbs from three sides, including several near the top of the tree. It has been trimmed back to a fraction of its former size in the hope that it will one day return to its former 15-year-old glory.

The newspaper says that our official accumulation was 5.5 inches. While it might not sound like much, the total accumulation of all known October snowfalls since 1869 was 3.5 inches.
The pictures below will give you a sense of what our weather looked like.

Note how many limbs are touching the ground. They're not supposed to do that.

The view from the front porch a bit earlier.

The view from our bedroom window.

The view from our bedroom window this afternoon.

And finally, some candlelight Yahtzee (at 6:30 pm).

Goodbye, Irene

Hurricane Irene (pictured above) has come and gone and, as far as I can tell, everybody in our area survived. Considering it was our first hurricane, our weather last night was pretty uneventful. We did have quite a bit of rain from about 7 pm last night until early this afternoon, along with some wind. Though we haven't actually been outside today, there aren't any broken tree branches that we can see and the wind was never strong enough to knock anything over or tear off siding or shingles. It is currently 73 and sunny and tomorrow it is supposed to be 78 with a 0% chance of rain, which should be a nice change of pace!