Monday's Musings: My Exciting Life (Snork!)

Being snowed in there isn’t a lot of exciting things going on in my life. Well, I suppose a blizzard falls into excitement category. Sort of. My husband went to work last Monday and was unable to get in again until Friday. It wasn’t like he didn’t try, but side roads aren’t a priority here. However, due to the volume of ice—4inches of the stuff, followed by 7 inches of snow—even the interstate (three miles of hell from our house) was in bad shape. He got about 6 miles from the house on the interstate missed being hit by a driver going too fast and not able to stop, and said screw this and turned around and came home. We were able to shovel the snow away but the ice was impossible to shovel on our driveway without the use of a jackhammer.

We were more than prepared for outages and no water. We had about 150 gallons of water set aside in the house. Sounds like a lot but I also have 3 horses, 3 outside Great Danes, and a rescue chow/lab mix, as well as 4 outside cats, so water is vital. Dogs all have insulated oak houses with plenty of hay bedding so they’re warm and toasty. Horses have a humongous barn to go into if they need shelter, although they rarely use it—they did during the blizzard.

We also have enough lanterns, lamps, and fuel to start a second hand shop not to mention long burning candles by dozens. We are fortunate to have three sources of heat for our house, central heating (which requires electricity to ignite), a big propane wall heater which operates whether we have electricity or not, and a cast iron wood stove which can double for cooking. I think we’ve use it all of two times. We have a very nice propane camp stove and a grill outside. I’ll take the camp stove, thank you. We take being prepared very seriously.

But we didn’t lose power. The linemen have been out daily the week before, cutting limbs, checking lines. The day before the storm, they were on our road finishing up a couple of pole/line replacements.

We live 7 miles from the nearest town—a mere flyspeck on the map but it does have a grocery store, two Dollar type stores, a couple of banks and diners, and about 3000 population and that's probably counting pets, lol! Our *big* town of 14, 000 is a little over 30 miles away. Our property is a mile down a gravel county road. It never sees a plow unless my neighbor hauls out his big combine styled tractor and clears it from his house (a mile away from us) to the paved road. He does that so he and his wife can get out if they need to.

Friday was sunny and clear. Really beautiful. We needed some supplies from the store after a week of being snowbound and another snowstorm due in Friday night (we got 7 inches of new snow). I needed to get out and see real people who weren’t on TV or my husband.

It was my first excursion outside my property driving a car. The car handled the 4 inches of packed sheet ice our little mile long section county road pretty good. Driver was only moderately white knuckled. The paved road was worse than my county road. Who would have thought that possible? I only had to traverse .4 miles of that and my car showed me how well it could shimmy. Yah, I zipped along going 15mph. Maybe. Then I was able to turn on a road that is usually plowed. It was better but still had lots of patches of ice, but at least I could see blacktop. Funny, I never paid attention to how hilly it was until Friday when I had to worry about,  a) not going off the road, b) getting up the next hill.

That road is only .9 of a mile long and it felt like ten. I was never so glad to see the stop sign and clear road. The two-lane interstate? Clear as a bell and dry. If I hadn't just snail-paced my way through 2.1 miles of rutted slushy, sheet iced yuck I would never have guessed how bad the side roads were.

Town roads were better. I did my banking and went to the grocery store, which at least had been sand & salted so it was mostly slush with patches of ice. It was nice to be out in the bright sunlight and I rode around a bit in town after shopping. The ugly clouds boiling up on the horizon made me realize the storm was imminent so I reluctantly headed home.

Return trip wasn't nearly as bad except the last 1.4 miles. Oh, and barely getting up my driveway. That took two tries and angling the car just right. By that time the clouds had caught up with me and most of the sunshine was gone. I did have time to feed and water the animals before the snow hit.

I lead such an exciting life.


So how have things been with you?

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I’ll be posting a few reviews on some really good books I’ve read lately from Elaine Coffman, Linda Wisdom, and Olivia Cunning. I’ve also gotten the latest books by Judi Fennell (squeeee) and Stephanie Rowe. So long as I have good books to read let it snow—which it will be doing off and on the next 3 days or so.


Some upcoming guests on Over Coffee: I have a couple of Valentine Short stories this week and Deborah Cootnz, Anjali Banerjee, and Jane Odiwe, to name a few. I have a few more lined up but I’ll tell about those later.