My apologies to anyone who's been trying to reach me the last couple days.
We've been living in the 19th century since Thursday night when the power
went out. It just came back on an hour ago.
The problem wasn't so much the 22" of snow we got Thursday night -- We in
the Buffalo area know how to deal with snow. The problem was, with all the
leaves still on the trees, the heavy wet snow stuck to the branches and took
them down. The entire metro area looks like a hurricane hit. At one point,
almost 400,000 people were without power, and some may not be back on for a
week.
We have most of a tree down in the backyard, one down in front of the house,
and my lilac tree alongside the driveway was ripped right out of the ground.
We were fortunate, however, in that we all got home safely from work
Thursday night (though a little late), and didn't have to go anywhere after
that. Everything in the area was closed Friday.
The house temperature got down to 53 degrees with no furnace, and the
basement got some water, but we kept it from drowning the new furnaces and
hot water tanks by baling for the last 2 days. 1/2 inch of rain last night
didn't help much. The sump pump is now running and the heat is on, so we
should be in good shape in a couple hours.
The worst part of all this was probably the boredom. You can only play
cards for so long by candlelight -- It's too hard to see. We baled out the
basement just to have something to do.
Anyway, I have over 100 emails to go through, so to anybody who sent me
one-- be patient. I'll get to you eventually.
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