Winter Sucks, But at Least I Had Heat

[Elspode]

So...Selene decides its time to start putting up Yule decorations, so we invite my son over (from his place all the way over on the other side of the driveway), start a fire in the fireplace for the first time, put on some hot cider, and have the boys start bringing down the hundreds of storage bins full of Yule decor. After an appropriate time with Selene putting out a portion of her enormous angel collection, we decide to go watch "White Christmas" on the new TV. Seems right, as we were in the process of accumulating six inches of snow over the ice that came down the day before.

We get to the last 90 seconds of the film, the big, colorful, beautiful holiday tableaux with der Bingle, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and the incredibly scrawny and lanky Vera Ellen singing their guts out, and...poof! No power.

It was around midnight or so, and about 15 degrees outside. Moreover, we were the only ones without power...all of our neighbors had lights, streetlights were lit, businesses behind us shining brightly through the snowfall. I snagged my trusty Everready LED headlamp, snatched up my cell phone and put in a call to the "help, our power is out" automated service. I feared the worst. Although I hadn't heard about any large scale outages so far, as a single customer with power out in a fairly serious snow event, I was worried that it could be days before we got power back.

Fortunately, when the ice started on Wednesday, youngest kid went into Apocalypse mode, and brought in a substantial amount of wood from the woodpile to the garage so it could be drying out. Using the three kids and myself, we made space around the woodstove on the sun porch (also previously unused - hell, it had been 60 degrees here on Tuesday) by removing most of the unpacked boxes still languishing there and rearranging the musical gear to leave a couple of feet clearance.

We got the woodstove fired up, and it immediately started putting out an impressive amount of heat. In fact, it kept all but two bedrooms upstairs at a toasty 72 degrees all night long. This is especially impressive when you consider that we normally only run the furnace at *68 degrees*!

Power came back on at about 6:30 Central time, and not a moment too soon. The last of the decent sized stuff is now burning in both the FP and the woodstove, and I've got a hell of a bark mess all over the house now. All in all, though, I could have imagined a much worse night than the one we spent all hunkered down like the old days.

Blessings are where you find them. I'm blessed with a pretty cool family and a pretty cool house with a pretty hot stove.