Snow Day!

We had our first official snow day today.   I know, those from Baltimore to Maine have had so much snow they'd probably like to smack me, but all the storms to date have skipped right over us.    It started with sleet for about 30 minutes then changed to heavy, wet snow.  

That's not good.   Took my son 6 hours to come home about 20 miles.   I was shoveling a couple of times during the evening so that I wouldn't hurt myself with heavy snow, and around 9 got a light show that was fantastic.    Unfortunately, along with the wires that kept falling around the neighborhood, mostly telephone and cable, ot electric, when 4 transformers blew at once, the sky was a wonderful blue/violet for almost a minute.    During all this, my wonderful maple treel dropped a few branches that made me sad, but didn't take my lines out for which I was happy. 

So I gathered up the flashlights, lanterns and candles, looked at my family and announced 9:30 was a good time to go to bed since there was no power.

5 am this morning my phone rang, to tell me school was closed for the day.  Great!   Except I had a meeting with architects at noon and ther were coming from out of town.   Still no power, so I went to work at 7, talked to the poor guys who had been there for 24 hours and were keeping the roads clean, and emailed the guy I was meeting to tel lhim the campus was closed, but if he still wanted to come, I'd meet him at noon.   He said he was here anyway, so lets do it.   So, I went home to shower and get out of my south park sweatshirt, because I didn't think that would be appropriate meeting attire, and then came back at 10:30 (because I still had no power and the house was 59 degrees).    The cats were grumpy with me and my DS and DH were out driving around to see how much damage there was.  

Today I revived my camping skills and dug out the old coffee pot and put it on the outdoor grill.  I went to a real restaurant for a late lunch because we still didn't have power.   And we talked about getting a generator for these types of things.

Dominion Virginia did an excellent job of getting power up as quickly as possible.    I mean really people, when there are over 112,000 places without power, trees are down on lines and across the road, and stupid car drivers abandon their ill equped vehicles in the middle of the street what do you expect these poor guys to do?    The bucket trucks couldn't "lift" until there was no wind, because a guy falling out of his bucket sure is gonna delay your repair, and I don't see anyone else volunteering to stand out there in the weather to watch.    So Hats off to The Linemen and others out there.

Stanley and Jack had different takes on the day.