fitzw | Deep Freeze: Day 2 (Saturday)

Saturday morning, temperature in the teens. More stoking of stoves, more bringing up wood from the basement to both floors.

I neglected to mention in the previous post that on Friday, my father had decided that he simply had to make a delivery of maple candy to a store in the center of town in the afternoon (my mother wanted me to drive, so that I could see what everything looked like in town). We found that there was a power line lying on the ground between the farm house and town (right about where that limb had fallen in front of the car on Thursday), and everything was coated with ice. It was scary-pretty. Broken trees in almost every yard, power lines and electric fence lines sagging under the weight of the ice.

I also neglected to mention that before I read to

helwen by lamplight, I spent some time tuning and playing a bit on one of our harps, followed by playing some tunes on one of the pennywhistles, tunes that we had sung at our recent SCA yule feast.

Water pressure was now gone (and had been since the previous evening), so buckets were filled in the back kitchen sink and carried to where they were needed: To the chickens for water, to the bathrooms that didn't have spring water for refilling the toilet tanks. This process, along with the carrying of firewood, was repeated during the day as needed.

Breakfast Saturday morning was tea and oatmeal, heated on the gas stove in the back kitchen. Our wood stove, despite being really efficient at producing heat (or maybe because of it) only gets the stove top to about 300°F–350°F, so the type of cooking that you want to do on it is the type of cooking that you would normally do in a crockpot. That's something we'll have to keep in mind for the future.

My brother W stopped by in the morning to work on installing a pump to move excess water from the heating system into a storage tank when it overheated (which it had been doing a bit of recently, even when there was power). Since there wasn't any power at that time, it seemed to be a good opportunity to work on it. W lives in a town bordering ours, which was also closed and without power, and mentioned that he had to dodge tree limbs down on the road all the way down.

We went down to visit

gwynt_y_storm and her family, having been invited down to use their shower and get away from the ice for a little while.

helwen and

gwynt_y_storm have both already related our shopping trip. We scored some really nice antique tools that are still in working order (my preference), including a tap-and-die set, a drafting set, two draw-shaves and a scraper, and a slide-rule.

We had lunch at their place, a pizza from a neighboring pizzeria. We didn't return to the farmhouse until after dark. We saw without seeing when we went through the center of town that someone's Christmas lights were lit on a bush that had been bent down on all sides by the ice, so that it looked like a glowing jellyfish, or perhaps a misshapen flying saucer. A flood light from the front of one of the churches glowed through broken branches of a tree along the walk. A Christmas tree farm had a motion-sensor light turn on as we drove by, and there was a light in the farther of the two buildings that they use for selling trees, the one with the solar panels on top.

We still don't know if the buildings in town had had their power restored by that time, or if they were running off of generators.

I loaned a battery-powered radio (rechargable by a crank dynamo, like my lantern) to my father. My parents were using a few old lanterns that they had, still filled with old kerosene. They were smelly, and they didn't provide much light, and I think one of the wicks hadn't been properly trimmed before the lantern was lit. I believe that we will pick up some fresh lamp oil for them and clean the wicks when we can.

Our evening entertainment was, again,

helwen sewing and me reading aloud. We retired for the evening at about 9:30 PM.