Someone said snow

Quick! There are two loaves left!

In these parts, when someone says, “snow”, everyone instinctively heads to the grocery store and buys bread and milk, and the Atlanta TV weather forecasters said the word. So, that’s what the bread section looked like at our local Walmart when we went there Friday night. After my peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch on Friday, I was down to one slice of bread, so I legitimately needed another loaf of bread. I don’t know how that happened, since loaves of bread typically have an even number of slices, and all of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches consist of two slice of bread sandwiching peanut butter and jelly. You are welcome to count the slices of bread in any new loaf you have, but if you find an odd number, don’t call me. Report a defective loaf to the manufacturer.

To be honest, there are lot of other places in the store where the shelves are pretty sparsely stocked, but not because of impending snowy doom. It’s just the way things are today. We have been looking for several days for our cats’ favorite canned food (salmon pate with extra gravy), but the cat food shelves have been essentially empty since at least Wednesday. I would insert a photo of the canned cat food shelves I texted to Leah on Wednesday to show her the pitiful state of canned cat food in America today, but it looks pretty much like the photo of the bread shelves, so just refer back to the top of this post.

To be honest, on Friday night one of the store employees went to the stock rooms in the back of the store and brought out a case of our cats’ favorite food, so they are in no danger of starving.

To be honest, our cats were not really in danger of starving. We had plenty of dry food and at least some canned food already. I don’t know what other cat owners will be serving their cats over the weekend. Snow, I guess.

To be honest, when it comes to empty bread shelves, there were a few of the more seedy, grainy types of bread to the left of these shelves. Those are the type that no one wants during a snow disaster, and they are the type that I usually buy, so I can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch on Saturday. And so, with salmon pate with extra gravy and a loaf of bread, we are ready for the blizzard.

To be honest, we aren’t going to get a blizzard. There really is going to be snow, along with potentially ice, Saturday night and Sunday, mainly in the northeastern part of the state, where the mountains are higher and the air is colder. Road crews from Atlanta northeastward are busy scurrying around spraying the highways with salt in preparation for frozen precipitation. Here in the northwest corner of the state, we are at the boundary between nothing and a dusting. We will not get salty roads, but we are not worried. We are expected to get strong winds, which might blow over a few trees, possibly causing a power outage for us, so we might still freeze to death, even without snow.

To be honest, we will not freeze, unless it gets very cold and the cold weather lasts for a long time, because we have a wood-burning stove with about a week’s worth of dry firewood. But if the power outage lasts for more than a week, we might still freeze to death.

To be honest, we are unlikely to freeze to death even then, because there is more firewood around our property that I can get fairly easily, for some values of “easily”, and it is highly unlikely that it will stay that cold for that long. If it does stay that cold for that long, it is probably the end of the world, so maybe freezing to death would be a better choice than seeing what comes after the end of the world.

Although, to be honest, the end of the world might not look a lot different from the way it looks right now.

Power!

I’m a little late posting this. We got our power back around 5:30 pm Monday, almost exactly four and a half days after we lost it. We were among the last to get power restored, not only in our area, but in the entire state.

We used about three gallons of purified water from the grocery store and probably three five-gallon buckets of less pure water every day that the power was out. We lost almost everything we had in our freezer. Since I couldn’t connect the refrigerator to our generator, it didn’t occur to me right away that I could connect the freezer.

I suppose it’s good that we don’t keep much in the freezer.

Just a note: ice cream is not good after it has been thawed for a few days and then refrozen.

It was quite a relief when the power came on. It was nice to have lights actually come on when I flipped a light switch. It was especially nice to have water come out of the faucet when I turned the handle. I was happy to take a hot shower that night.

This has made it clear that we need to be better prepared for the next power outage. The biggest problem was, of course, no water, since we’re on a well. My plan is to have an electrician wire a circuit breaker lockout and a fixture where we can plug in a generator. Without a big generator we will be able to power only part of the house, but that will be OK. If we can power the refrigerator and freezer, a few light circuits, and some outlets in the living room, we will be fine. Oh, and, of course, the well pump.

Smells like Christmas

Tropical Storm Zeta dropped by here early Thursday morning. It was not a good visitor. It didn’t stay long, and it tore the place up.

We woke up around 3 am to wind and rain. Leah got up around 5:30 and went into the kitchen. I heard her say, “Oh, great!” That’s when the power went off.

Zeta was predicted to bring pretty strong winds, and it did. Rome reported a peak gust of 55 mph. That was bad enough, but we had had about three inches of rain the day before, and along with the rain Zeta brought, it was enough to make the ground soggy and soft. Especially soft. Soft enough that trees fell all over North Georgia. Falling trees means, among other things, fallen power lines. Georgia Power said the storm damage was the worst in about 60 years. I checked the Georgia Power outage map for our area. It was busy.

Each icon indicates a power outage in a given area. The icon just left of center, with 15 in it, is our area. Clicking on the icon brings up information on how many customers were without power. Our little mountaintop community showed 12 customers, which means every single one of us. The numbers in the icons don’t show the number of customers without power. Other icons closer to town represented up into the hundreds of customers. The total in the Georgia Power service area was around a million.

The worst power outage we have had in our 15 years up here is less than a day. Georgia Power’s estimate for restoring power is 11 pm Sunday. For us, a very long power outage is more than an inconvenience. We have a decent generator, which means we can string extension cords through the house and get some lights, the TV, and the freezer running. Unfortunately, our refrigerator is a press fit into the cabinets, so we can’t get to the power cord for it. So now we have lights and TV, but since we are on a well, we have no water. That’s a problem. So I decided to drive down to town to get some water. That’s when we ran into the next problem. Downed trees blocked Fouche Gap Road down to Huffaker Road, which is the way we get into town.

I walked the dogs down to check it out. There was a second blockage a little further down.

The dogs and I edged past the trees, which were hanging on power lines, something I wouldn’t have done if the power lines were live. Further down the road we ran into more downed trees, but also a county road crew that was clearing the road.

Unfortunately for us, they wouldn’t touch trees that fell on power lines.

All the broken pines smelled like a Christmas tree farm.

There is a detour that leads down the far side of the mountain into Texas Valley, west along the northern edge of the mountain, and then to Huffaker a few miles further out. That adds at least 10 miles to our trip. Unfortunately (a lot of things were unfortunate), Big Texas Valley Road was blocked by trees. There is another way out of the valley that leads to Rome’s major north-south highway, US 27. The road narrows to one lane for some distance. It also had downed power lines, but they were dangling so that we could thread our way through. We got into town, but that detour is more than 20 miles, because it ends up on the wrong end of town for us.

Friday morning I saw our neighbor John, who has a grading company. He met a friend and they cut a narrow tunnel through the first downed tree on Fouche Gap. They expected to clear both places. On Friday Leah and I decided to drive into town, so we headed down Fouche Gap to Huffaker, expecting to find both blockages cleared. The second downed tree was not cleared. I said S*%T, and not for the last time. So we turned around and decided to take a chance on the 10-mile detour instead of the 20-mile detour. It was passable, but only because residents had taken their own chainsaws to the trees and cleared just enough to get by.

We stocked up on gallon jugs of filtered water for drinking and washing (hands and dishes, not entire bodies). We have a little wet-weather spring next to our driveway that provided water for toilet flushing. By Saturday it was running fairly low. Just about the time I was finding that out a neighbor came by and said we could get water at his house. He has a generator big enough to power his well pump and most of his house. I took him up on that offer, so as of late Saturday we have almost six gallons of drinking water and five five-gallon buckets filled with toilet-flushing water.

Another neighbor got a generator that automatically shuts off the company power lead and sends power into the house. Her generator is big enough to power everything in her house. That would be nice, but that kind of setup starts at around $4000 just for a smallish generator without installation. It’s hard to justify spending that kind of money for something that happens so infrequently. On the other hand, another neighbor and her husband use EPAP machines, so they have to have power. They ended up at a hotel.

Saturday morning a power company crew cleared the two trees that were blocking out way off the town side of the mountain. That allowed me to get to a fast food place and back in a reasonable time.

So, as of now, we have some water. We have some lights. It’s going to get cool tonight and cold tomorrow night. If the power company is right, we ought to have heat in time for the coldest part of the night. And how shower. That will be nice.

Fog over the river

Saturday morning was overcast after an early morning light rain. Off in the distance we could see where the large Georgia Power Plant Bowen stacks stand. Bowen is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in North America.

Coal-fired power plants are almost always located on rivers because they use the river water for cooling. The Etowah River flows past the plant and then on through Rome, where it meets the Oostanaula River to form the Coosa River. If you look carefully at this photo, you can see where the river flows.

The river has another river right above it, formed by advection fog. Advection fog is usually formed by warm, humid air flowing over something that is cooler, causing some of the water vapor to condense into fog. The fog is the faint, thin, lighter line slightly under the mid-point of the image. The river is 20 to 25 miles from our house.

Many years ago when my family moved into our new house, our living room looked over fields and low hills towards the same river as it neared town. The river was probably less than two miles from our house. We often saw fog over the river then. In the more than 40 years since, the short pines in the back yard grew up and now tower over the house, completely blocking the view.

Snow and fog

It started snowing Saturday morning about the time I got out of bed. It didn’t amount to much for a while. By the time I took the dogs for a walk, it was beginning to stick.

That was around 10 am. Even though it had been fairly warm earlier in the week, the snow was starting to stick on the roads. By the time we got back home, there was about two inches.

And then, by the afternoon, it was all gone.

The temperature dropped a little overnight, although not below freezing. When we got up Sunday morning, we had dense fog. This was up close to the top of the mountain, when I took the dogs for their walk.

The fog got thinner the lower we went. I think that means it was actually a cloud by that time.

Our weather has been wet and quite warm. It rained a lot before we got the snow, and it’s raining again now, as I write this Monday evening. We have had a fire most of the recent days, but, except for a couple of really cold nights, we could have done without. Now, the temperature is actually supposed to go up though the night. It’s 50F now and is supposed to be around 60F by morning. It looks like winter is almost over. At least that’s what this clematis thinks.

Clematis is deciduous; it’s not supposed to start leafing out until spring. We have some bulbs that are similarly early. In fact, some of our bulbs sprouted new foliage even before all the old leaves had turned brown and shriveled.

This weather. It’s all so confusing.