Ice Storm

So this is what the front of my garage looked like around the time of my last post. I’m hoping this explains why I haven’t written in a while. More than half of this is has been moved into the house now.

Leia doesn’t mind if the power’s out.

Yes, that’s our car.

Last Saturday the power went out around 5 am, and stayed out for more-or-less twelve hours. We ran the gas fireplace most of the day and used an “safe-for-indoors” propane heater in the bedroom for a while. I cracked a couple windows to ensure we were getting fresh air.

The outage was caused by an ice storm, an event that must be pretty rare around here because no one was prepared for it. Power went out through most of the county and, as I write on Monday morning, I’m aware that lots of folks are still without power. And not just here in the farm country! We have friends in suburban Portland who are still waiting. They have an electric stove in their kitchen, so they’ve been cooking on a propane camp stove on their porch. “fun”

This was our back yard on Saturday morning.

Saturday was warm, so the quarter-inch (?) of ice that formed on the trees melted all day long. At one point, it appeared to be raining in our front yard, but was completely sunny on the street. This was all just melt water. I moved our cars out from under the trees since they can’t fit in the garage yet, and chunks of ice the size of gravel were raining down on them along with the “rain”.

We lost a few branches, and one mid-sized tree fell over our stone wall from the easement. I’ll have to go out and chop it up at some point. It didn't hit the house or do any real damage.

I wish I could say the same for our neighbors!

I lifted this from Facebook.

Also from Facebook.

Facebook, again.

There are a lot of power lines down too, but I couldn’t find a good picture. As yo can see, folks around here have a lot of cleaning up to do. I’m surprised, and relieved, that people aren’t reporting a lot of house damage. I haven’t seen a single damaged roof, though I have seen a couple downed trees that would have definitely destroyed a roof if they’d landed on one.

It’s also nice that the Facebook groups for our town are showing a lot of neighborly support. My favorite story is a bunch of guys who posted that if anyone saw them climbing the fence at a storage facility it was fine because they got permission from the owner, and notified the police. They needed to get some emergency heaters out of the locker, for a neighbor.

Anyway, life goes on and highs this week will be back to the upper forties with scattered rain and sun.

Hot water, no waiting!

And finally for today, I have to talk about a small feature of this house that I have fallen in love with. I was not aware that any such thing existed before we moved here and I have no idea what the cost etc. might be, but here it is — the In-Sink-Erator!

The In-Sink-Erator is an instant hot water device that sits at the edge of you sink and delivers either “normal hot” water or “nearly boiling hot” water instantly. I use it for making coffee in the morning and for hydrating the cats’ food. No running the tap until the water gets hot, no waiting for the tea kettle to heat up, just turn a valve and BOOM — hot water. Yes, it’s silly that I am so stoked about this, but I really, really am.

The label bothers me though. To me it reads “near-boiling hot water” as if you get the same thing ragardless of which way you rotate the handle. What they actually mean is that clockwise gets you near-boiling and counter-clockwise gets you normal hot water. A little space between “(190 F)” and “hot” would have made that much more clear. Or is this just me being “neuro-divergent”? I have no idea.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope my next post will have pictures of the house. Be safe, be happy.