My Horrible Weekend (Picture Heavy)

Well now, where do I start? On Friday, we had an ice storm come through, knocking out trees, power lines, ECT. Friday morning we lost electricity. I was hoping that this was just a fluke thing, and we started to wait for it to come back on. The temp’s outside were in the teens, and the house temp was starting to drop. We soon realized that it was not going to be any time soon to bring back power, because over 200,000 had lost it. We started a fire in the fireplace, and tried to have that warm up the house. It was evening time and my snake room had dropped down to 60 degrees. That’s when I started to get worried. I started to panic, looking for things to warm up the room without requiring electricity. After about an hour of searching, I decided to make the move. I moved every one of my snake racks into the living room with the fireplace, and tried to keep the temp’s steady. I stayed up all night on Saturday stoking the fire with more logs to keep the room warm. Finally, everything in the freezer was going bad so we had to move stuff to other people’s houses to keep everything frozen.

Last night we finally broke down and bought a 5,000 watt generator from Home Depot. We spent 2 hours rigging it into the breaker box, and then finally we managed to get some heat and some lights. I moved everything back into the snake room since temps were staying steady.

We are still here without power, almost 3 days now. The generator works good, but it is expensive to run. (5 gallons of gas every 11 hours)

Luckily, we had money saved up for emergencies like this one, and our wallets are not suffering to bad. These are not all the pictures I took of the week, but they are the best ones.

Ameren has only been down our street once, and they just marked a line. Let’s hope they come fix this soon, because another storm is on its way.

Here is a tree that fell on our power line in the backyard, just one of the many reasons we don't have power.


We had trees fall ontop of our camper that we had in the driveway.

Tree's falling the the backyard,


Weighted down tree in the driveway,


Tree's falling and crashing all over the neighboorhood,




About a 1 1/2 inches of ice on all trees, branches, anything outside,


And we had a nice tree crash ontop of our hot tub room,


And some nice pictures I took,

Well, that pretty much sucks. Even though I have hurricanes down here, I don't have to worry about stuff freezing, and we _do_ get plenty of notice to evacuate. I used to hate ice storms, though- they do so much damage.

But now that you have the generator- what a relief! No more worrying about power outages ever. I wish I had one...

Great pics!

Nanci

Wow that sucks. I thought it was a minor thing when my dad said ice storms were coming and I woke up with 1/4 inch of melting snow on the ground. But now that I think about it, Yahoo said something about it in the headlines.

I read about the ice storms on the news. That looks pretty rough.

That is definately the one thing I do NOT miss from my days in the North East...ice storms. We used to get them in Upstate NY regularly when I was growing up as a kid. I always hated them...sheets of ice all over everything, powerlines going down, car accidents every 20 feet on every rd...simply awful things to experience.

Sorry for your troubles, but glad to hear that everything is working out OK. Good Luck!

Thanks guys, ameren is down to 61,000 without power, and we are still one of those lol!

Ryan McCullough

i feel for you man, i just got my power back on today. we where staying at the inlaws house. i was lucky, cause they let me bring my reptiles with me.

Brrrrrr. That's why I live in Texas...I can handle the heat alot better than the cold. Hope you get power back real soon!

Ice storms are the WORST.We got that storm front not long after you did. Luckily for us, most of the ice stayed south.. We only got about 1/4 inch of ice compared to 3/4's they got south of us. Glad you were able to get a generator, I'm sure it will get much more use then these past couple days.

pkeafergus said:

Brrrrrr. That's why I live in Texas...I can handle the heat alot better than the cold. Hope you get power back real soon!

Click to expand...

I can handle heat...It's the humidity that kills me!!!!!!! Is why I hate summer up here.....GETS TOO HUMID!

Hmmm... I take it you're further East? We didnt do too bad here except for the roads. They didn't clean the back streets until today. Our street was so bad, someone mowed over our street sign and hit the neighbor's car. Our neighbor across the street backed out of her driveway and ended up stuck half way in our yard and half way in the street. Usually we don't see so that much activity on days like this! However, I'd rather watch cars on ice than go through that!

I did work this weekend when all the freezing rain and sleet was coming down. I had kennel duty this weekend at the clinic, and let me tell ya, walking a great dane on ice is kind of awkward.

Yay! Today when I got home, we had power again!

Yay! Yay!

Thanks for the words,

Ryan McCullough

Yay!!! I _know_ the feeling!!

Nanci

being in Canada, I've seen my share of ice storms, snow storms, you name it. No hurricanes though! We're thinking of buying a generator now as well. It really sucks when the power is gone, We don't have a fireplace in the house, so we end up just layering the clothes on, but so far we've been lucky and the longest power outage was only about 12 hours or so. We do have a propane heater that we take camping, and if worst came to worst, that would be focused on my corn snake for sure...the rest of us can bundle up!
I hope the power is back on soon for you! Good luck!!