Snowstorm shopping

I still haven't figured out why every time there's a big snowstorm, this happens in the supermarket:

We joke about all the people who are going to make French toast because bread, milk and eggs seem to sell well before a storm, but chips and salsa?

Oh, and for Mother Hen, who has never seen a pumpkin covered in snow, here's a snowman with a pumpkin for a head!

Happy snow-olleen!

WOW - they really weren't kidding when they predicted widespread power outages! We got about 12 inches of heavy wet snow. The branches in the first photo aren't usually that low - they were weighed down by the snow. (Everything below the word Trick  would normally not be there!)

Note the tree that's lying down on the left in the photo above - here it is again a few hours later:

We got off pretty lightly. The power was only out for 49 hours - there are thousands of homes that still don't have their power back yet - and the temperature in the house only dipped to 52˚F. We have city water rather than a well, so we did not lose our water too. We have a camping stove so we had hot food and drink. We have a chainsaw, so we did not have to wait for the city to come and remove the trees that had fallen and blocked the end of our road. About the only thing we don't have that would have been nice is smartphones. The reporting on the radio was useless in terms of letting us know what the situation was in the wider world and some internet access would have been nice!

I spent most of Sunday hand sewing DS's Halloween costume that I had been planning on finishing on the sewing machine. Then tonight we found out that trick-or-treating is postponed until next Saturday! In many neighborhoods it would not have been safe to go out trick-or-treating tonight because there are still downed powerlines. Even where there aren't, there are tree branches down all over the place. Most people seem to have cleared their driveways, but not necessarily the sidewalk.

It certainly has been a memorable Halloween!

Images of winter

Stop the snow! This is the end of our street. There's a road under there somewhere! (More snow forecast for Feb 21st - at least it's a holiday anyway, so we don't have to have a 'snow day' from school!)

Waiting for the bus. Climbing the snow pile is a necessity so the school bus driver knows you are there and doesn't drive on by . . .

My neighbor is not going gray. She walked her son to the school bus stop with damp hair and her hair froze!

 A sign of spring on its way - signups for Little League baseball have started! Summer camps are advertising too.

Got summer?

Shoveling snow off a school roof - why they put up so many buildings with flat roofs in the northeast of the US is beyond me!

Ice sculpture downtown

What's that beep?

There's nothing quite like being woken up by an insistent beeping, realizing it's not your alarm clock and then figuring out it is some kind of alarm. My first thought was that it was the carbon monoxide detector. We've had that go off a couple of times in the past - although that was at the last house where we had a wood stove. One time I arrived home from work and could hear the alarm going off before I even got in the house. I called DH at work, who said it was probably a malfunction and I should ignore it. Instead, I called the fire department who arrived promptly and headed into the house wearing their full respirator gear. They didn't come out until they had opened every window in the house and the basement hatchway - in the middle of January, mind you - because the carbon monoxide levels in the house were lethal, even on the top floor of the house!!

So when I realized it wasn't the alarm I was hearing, my first thought was that it was the carbon monoxide detector. I sent DH off to investigate. He returned looking confused and said it was the house alarm. Something electrical had tripped and thus set off the alarm. (The house alarm has a battery backup - when the power to the alarm goes off the battery backup kicks in and the alarm beeps until you unplug it or the power comes back on. Very annoying when the power goes off in a thunderstorm, which it often does.) Anyway, DH unplugged a few things and then tried resetting the breaker, but nothing seemed to work - every time he plugged the alarm system back in, it eventually started beeping again.

We had a feeling it probably had something to do with the ice dams on the roof, especially when mid-morning we found water pouring down the front of the house from the porch roof - water was clearly coming through the roof.

It wasn't until this evening that we finally figured out what had actually tripped the breaker. I wanted to take a photo for this blog of our Christmas lights, which are still on the bushes outside the front door because with all the snow and ice we haven't been able to remove them yet. DH had finally unplugged them this morning. I plugged them back in, but no matter how I fiddled with the timer they would not switch on. We unplugged them from the timer and plugged them directly into the outlet. Still no lights.

We think the voles that killed one of our trees last year by chewing off the bark all the way around have chewed their way through one of the wires for the lights. It will be some time before we are able to remove the lights from the bushes though to find out.

At least now that the lights are unplugged DH has been able to reset the breaker and the alarm is plugged back in! And if we make it through this winter with nothing damaged other than one set of Christmas lights, we'll be doing better than our next door neighbor who has over $1,000 worth of damage to his garage walls because of the ice dams on his garage roof.

2 to 4 more inches of snow forecast for tomorrow night.

Now where did that compost bin go?

Following up to the last post . . .

I went out to the compost bin yesterday.  I followed the path that DH had snowblowed across the lawn and into the woods.

Where I found this:

There are three compost bins under there somewhere. Yes, what's in the bins does stay frozen for much of the year, but we keep adding to it anyway. The currently 'active' bin is the one in the middle and I couldn't (be bothered to) get to it yesterday. I picked the one closest to me and cleared just enough snow to be able to open it. Amazingly, it wasn't frozen shut.

Serious about recycling

We try to be good about recycling as much as we can - we have several containers in the garage for paper, plastic glass and so on and most of the 'trash' that I take to the dump n a Saturday morning is actually recycling. The town requires it, we are perhaps more conscientious about it than many, everyone here is supposed to recycle. Recently they started a composting program, which they charge an additional fee for. You can take compostable food scraps to the dump and they use them to make  . . . compost. We haven't signed up for that program because we do our composting at home.

We have a shoebox-sized tupperware-type box on the kitchen counter and all the food scraps get put in there. (Not meat or stuff that is greasy - just things like fruit and vegetable peelings, coffee grounds and tea bags.) It usually takes about a week to fill the box, and then it gets dumped into the compost bin at the far end of the garden, just on the edge of the woods. It's not huge chore - though the children hate to do it because they are scared to go out to the compost bin by themselves in case there are bears around. We haven't seen any bears, or any evidence of them being around in a long time though. It can also be difficult in the winter to open the compost bin as the lid often freezes shut.

More of a problem this coming weekend, when the box will fill up again, was going to be the fact  that there is a layer of snow over three feet deep on the ground. So DH decided to make sure we could get to the compost bin. As usual, once the snow stopped, he had to clear a path from the front to the back of the house so that we can get heating oil delivered. (The oil guy will leave without delivering rather than trek through snow and we definitely don't want to run out!) He decided to keep going with the snow blower and headed all the way out to the compost bin and back around the house!

Raking the roof

One of the things my husband was hoping to avoid when we moved house was having to do too much raking in the fall. Our old house was surrounded by trees and the raking took forever. This house has plenty of trees close by, but because of the prevailing winds and a lack of fences or hedges, most of the leaves just blow away.

This year is the first year ever though that he has had to rake the roof! Not for leaves, obviously, but snow. Usually there's enough of a break between storms, and the temperatures are warm enough that the snow melts. This year the snow has been building up. Looking at our neighbor's house, I would guess they have 18 inches of snow on the roof right now. Getting the snow off the roof is important for two reasons. 1) If there's enough of it, it can actually cause the roof to collapse.  2) Heat from the house causes snow on the roof to melt. The snow and ice in the gutters does not melt as fast, so the water coming off the roof has nowhere to go and it can end up backing up under the shingles and into your house.

I was surprised to find that there is actually a blog that is about nothing but roof rakes! I have to say, having tried to use ours this afternoon, I'd rather rake leaves. For one thing, the weather's usually a lot pleasanter when I'm out raking leaves!

Working up a sweat in the cold

As it's MLK Day, there is no school today. I was determined not to have the children stay inside watching TV all day (as they would if I gave them the choice of what to do) so we headed off to one of the local schools that has a great hill for sledding. DD spent 2 hours there yesterday with her Girl Scout troop. We got there a little later than I had planned, but that's OK as it was a holiday after all. We were very surprised to find few other people there - some of the time the hill looked like this:

This photo makes the hill look less steep than it really is. Plus, the section on the left that you see DD climbing was well packed down from the weekend's sledding, so it was icy and very fast.

I had (for once) planned ahead and brought a flask of hot chocolate and some snacks, so we had those after an hour. At that point I took the outer layer of my winter coat off as I was just too hot. The kids and I all worked up quite a sweat trekking up the hill, and even standing around in the sunshine at the bottom of the hill was quite pleasant so long as you weren't sitting on the snow. It wasn't until we were on our way home that I noticed what the temperature was on this glorious, too nice to stay inside, day: 17˚F (that's minus 8˚C!) You see, the cold is just fine if you're doing the right things and are appropriately dressed for it!

A little bit of snow

Americans who live in the snow belt always laugh when the UK grinds to a halt because of an inch or so of snow. I was ready to do the same thing this week, but then I saw this satellite photo of the UK today:


There are a few places where you can still see green - part of Anglesey, and on the south coast in Devon - but not many! I grew up on the Wirral and we rarely if ever got any snow there, though we could often see it on the Welsh hills. It looks just as white as the rest of the UK today! I have no doubt that they really don't have enough ploughs, sanders and gritters to deal with this, even it is only a few inches.

My old secondary school is closed and will not open again until next Monday at the earliest. I don't EVER remember school being closed for bad weather when I was a kid, though my primary school closed once for a day because the boiler broke and there was no heat. I was intrigued to see this on the high school website though:


It looks as though they are trying to avoid the issue of having to make up the snow days by asking kids to login from home and complete work that's been assigned. (VLE = Virtual Learning Environment) I've never seen that done over here. Boy, I wish we could have done that last year when we had 9 snow days and ended up losing 3 days from our April vacation so that we could still complete 180 days of school as required by the end of June. (State schools in the UK have to put in 190 days I believe.) We have a VLE (Moodle) in my district, but relatively few teachers use it, and some of the towns in the district still only have dial-up internet access so it's not practical to require kids to use it anyway!

Only a few miles away from my hometown, the independent school my father used to work at also closed yesterday and today (in common with all Wirral, North Wales, Wrexham schools and most Cheshire schools) but will be open tomorrow:

The school will be open for all pupils on Friday 8 January.

Notes for parents
The car parks will still be very icy and potentially hazardous, especially after an overnight frost, so extreme care will be needed; please do not stay on site any longer than it takes to drop your children off. Staff will be on hand in the car parks to assist. For safety reasons and because of extremely limited parking, we are not allowing sixth formers to drive to school.

Buses should be running as normal tomorrow, though buses will not be driving through the villages and so will drop pupils off on the way home on the main roads at the points where they were picked up in the morning.

I guess it's a good thing schools all seem to have websites nowadays to make these announcements! Here in New England, snow days and delayed starts because of bad weather are so common that most schools districts now have automated calling systems in addition to posting cancellations and delays on local radio and TV. I remember once driving most of my 60+ mile commute to work before hearing on the radio that school was cancelled for the day. At that point we didn't have an automatic calling system, and where I lived I couldn't get the TV or radio stations that the school posted its cancellations on. Where I lived the weather was fine so I set out for work! After that, I learned to log on to the school email system or website every morning in the winter just in case!

Blue skies and snowy days

I remember a January day my very first winter in New England - walking across the quiet, almost empty, university campus and really enjoying the feeling of being on holiday. There was snow on the ground and the sky was cloudless. I remember being quite delighted by the sun sparkling off the snow because I don't remember ever seeing snow in England sparkle. When we made Christmas decorations in primary school and used white glitter to decorate them it never occurred to me that snow really could sparkle like that - I thought it was a pretend thing!

Even when it's really cold (and even when I have to go to work), those sunny days in winter lift my spirits, especially when there's snow on the ground. Yesterday was one of those gorgeously sunny days and it was a nice day to be out and about:


Today it is not like that. We woke to grey skies and the forecast of 4 to 8 inches of snow. Instead of sitting in a puddle of sunshine on the dining room floor this afternoon reading a book, as I did yesterday, I've been sitting on the living room floor playing games with the husband and kids.

Quirkle is our game of choice this winter - one of those simple to learn games that requires some thought and strategy to play well. The snow is pretty and it's nice to have family time and an excuse for not having to go anywhere or do anything outside the house.



Having said that, once we get to the end of February I'm usually ready for winter to be over, or at least for there to be no more snow. But for all my griping about the weather, I would definitely miss New England winters if I ever moved back to the UK!

Snow day

It didn't start snowing until almost 1 o'clock this afternoon, but school was cancelled for the day anyway. The kids and I had a lazy start to the day, having breakfast about 9. The squirrels were out there pigging out as usual, but suddenly there was a huge flurry of activity, animals racing across the lawn, that caught our attention. We realized that something large had just chased a couple of squirrels up a tree. They went too high for the larger animal to follow them, at which point it started to back down the tree and then raced off into the woods in pursuit of another squirrel. It took me a moment to figure out what it was - it looked vaguely racoon sized - but then as it turned and I saw its face and then looked again at its tail, I realized it was a bobcat! They're not particularly uncommon animals in North America, but it's really unusual to see them in broad daylight! Descriptions of them usually include the words 'elusive' and/or 'seldom seen'.

DS was convinced he'd seen a leopard or cheetah until I looked it up online and showed him some pictures. You can see why he was confused:

Of course the whole thing happened far too fast for me to get any photos of my own. We went out afterwards to look at the footprints, but although the bobcat's prints were noticeably different to all the squirrel prints out there they didn't look particularly cat-like. The snow on the ground this morning was covered in a layer of ice and there were several places where the bobcat hadn't even broken through the ice and so there were no pawprints at all!


The large white circles are not snowflakes but drops of water on the window.

Pass at own risk!

Since the weekend, I've come to the conclusion it's not really the snow I dislike so much about winter. When it snows, I simply stay home until the storm is over and the roads have been ploughed. What I really don't like is the ice, and the HUGE potholes that form in the roads. We have signs on the main road that we have to drive along to get to our house that say "Potholes ahead. Proceed at own risk." These are not temporary signs. They have been there for, as far as I know, at least the last eleven years - since we bought a house in this town! You'd think that at some point in eleven years they could have fixed the potholes, but no! They do some temporary patching, but they know it's not going to last so they don't take the signs down.

Currently there are some sections of road where it is absolutely impossible to avoid the potholes because they spread across the entire width of the road. (Not one pothole that wide, but a series of them arranged in such a way that it is impossible to avoid them.) Some are very wide and only an inch or two deep at this point, but others are already ten or twelve inches deep! This despite the fact that they've already done one round of patching this winter. They haven't done anything recently though, as patching a twelve inch deep hole that's full of slush doesn't work. Because of the amount of water on the roads from the melting snow, it is difficult to tell how deep most of the potholes are, so you have to assume the worst as you're driving - that they will swallow your tires and cause serious damage to your vehicle. When the water freezes, it evens out the road a little - but, of course, it also makes the potholes bigger in the long run!

In the town's defense, they have plans to widen the road and that will of course involve resurfacing the whole thing, so it seems like a waste to repair the potholes too thoroughly. The only thing is, the plan to widen the road has been in place for over eleven years (i.e. since BEFORE we bought our house!) This week there have finally been surveyors out at this end of the road, close to the line with the next town, so it looks as though the work will actually begin this year. They've even put up signs on the side roads leading to the main road:

(Photo taken from a side road, looking towards the main road, which runs left-right across the photo.)
All the trees on the other side of the main road within 6 feet of the road have orange marks on them (not just the few you can see in the photo.) This is the first stage of the road widening - all those trees will be felled. With luck, this will bring more sunlight in to the end of our road. Currently there is a layer of ice across the end of the road - just visible in the photo, but not in all its glory. It is several inches thick, and there are ruts in in it several inches deep. Without anti-lock brakes, or driving EXTREMELY slowly (as in barely moving), stopping at the end of the road is next to impossible right now.

When the weather improves* and they do eventually get started, there is no way we will be able to get anywhere once the work starts without having to navigate the roadworks. Sadly, even the thaw I'm looking forward to will bring no relief in terms of driving around here!

*Apparently no time soon, as there's 4 to 8 inches of snow forecast for Friday night!

Will somebody please find . . .

the Snow Queen and get rid of her? It's looking much too much like Narnia before the thaw around here!

This photo was taken last Saturday. It didn't come out as well as I'd hoped - the yellow dot is a lamp post.



This one was taken at 3:30 this afternoon.


I stopped to buy milk on the way home this afternoon. (Not because it was snowing, but because we really needed some. Honest!) The clerk at the store's commentary on the weather was: "What happened to the rain we were supposed to get today? I've had enough of all this snow. I'm SO ready to mow the lawn!"