Sunday, February 12, 2006

Snow Day

And here's why I'm so behind on some of my posting ... We were snowed in a bit today. The official reports were about 12 inches; I'd say we got about 8 inches where we are, but it did knock out the power from about 3:30 a.m. to 4:20 p.m., which meant no heat for most of the day. In general we did pretty good, considering that the furnace is set to roll back the temperature in the house overnight to 55°F (the normal daytime setting is 65°F, although we often bump it up a degree or two if it's feeling too chilly). The coldest it got was 51°F, and Celeste didn't really start complaining until after her nap when it was about 52°F. The power came back up while we were out at Target (both to warm up and to pick up a few things), and I dropped Celeste and Evelin off at G---'s house for a late playdate and to wait while the house warmed up and I reset all the clocks.

I did a lot of shoveling in the morning, but it wasn't too heavy of snow and I kind of like the getting out and talking to neighbors, etc., that goes along with these sorts of events. Of course, the neighbor next door who has to turn on his generator whenever the power's out for more than five minutes fired the noisemaker up a little past 8:00 a.m., and then went back inside until most of the houses around him had their sidewalks shoveled. It was at that point that he comes back outside with his snowblower*, leading to a nice bit of schadenfreude when the machine kept clogging and/or cutting off every few inches. In the end, he ended up having to shovel, I think. (He was still playing with the choke on it when I finished and went in to take a shower — a gas hot water heater is a good thing.)

*I'm not saying he waited until most of use were done so that he didn't have to feel guilty about not offering to use the snowblower to help out anyone, but it sure seemed like suspicious timing.

Technorati tags:

No comments: