Ice, Ice Baby

Thursday into yesterday we had an ice storm that hit NH almost as bad as the storm 10 years ago. Fortunately, though, the roads weren't too bad, but ice formed on so much stuff that there were downed trees and power lines blocking roads everywhere. We went without power off and on during Thursday night, but it went out for the day at about 4:30am on Friday. John got up to check on our sump pump, which the well was full. He bailed out some of the water, but it was useless. At 5am we both got up, and bailed out more water, but it was coming in just as fast as we could get it out. At about 8 in the morning, our good friend, Jared, came over to help us with the water, because I needed to keep an eye on Hannah. Because we had turned the heat up in the house during the overnight, it wasn't freezing in the house, but it was below 60, so it was getting chilly. The storm didn't last long, but we were without power until about 6:50 Friday night, when PSNH played a cruel trick on us - our power was on for about 30 minutes when a transformer blew (I saw the explosion out the window, and John and I both heard all the noise) and we were without power again. We had only been able to get the house warmed up to about 60 degrees before it went out again. We had dinner out at a Chinese restaurant to thank Jared for all his help (he stayed all day to help bail out the water), so it was good to get a hot dinner and get warmed up. I took Hannah out in the car during the day too so she could get warmed up and we could pick up some groceries - we did manage to find one store that was open and running on a generator. No heat though, which was kind of a bummer.
We have a neighbor with a generator that let us plug our sump pump in with an extension cord while the power was down, which was a life saver for John and Jared.
Anyway, we got our power back last night at about 10:45, but the sad part was that we forgot to switch our sump pump off the generator and back onto the power, so when our neighbor shut off the generator, we had no pump. Oops. Needless to say, we woke up to a flooded basement. It wasn't terrible, and we've finished the clean up already, it's just still a bit damp. At least we had the forsight to tile our computer room floor.

Anyway, here are some pictures from the damamage at our house:This was a branch that broke off our pine tree in the front yard. Part of it was sticking out into the road, so the town helped clean some of it up.

This is out back yard with some branches down all over the place. We have some massive clean up to do today.

The branch you see behind our grill next to our clothes line actually damaged our chain link fence. How it didn't hit the house, we'll never know.

The lovely fence problem...

Our broken down front yard tree again.

The fence again. Remember that you can see our clothesline in this picture.

More back yard damage...

A kind of blurry picture of the "damage" a branch did to our roof. Fortunately, it also didn't do anything structural.

Remember that clothesline you saw earlier? Yeah, it's gone. Another branch fell, narrowly missing John, and took out our clothesline.



The ice on our honey suckle bush.

Icicles on the deck

The honeysuckle



Trees that are ice covered.

Pictures

Still no pictures back from the family portraits - those will be coming back on Friday! For now, I have some photos to share of recent 6 month pictures of Hannah, as well pictures from the tornado damage I saw in Epsom while driving to and from my parents house on Saturday. So, here they are:

Hannah and Nana (my mom)

Hannah playing in Nana and Grandad's back yard

Hannah, Mommy and Grandad in the pool at Grandad and Nana's house

Hannah playing with her ball

Hannah playing with Kane (the family dog)

Below: These pictures are from the tornado in Epsom. They were taken off of Route 4.

There was lightnin' last night!

So last night I ran an errand to the mall. There had been a severe thunderstorm watch in effect for a good part of the night, but it didn't look like there was a storm coming. I left Kane loose in the house, and headed out to the mall. When I left the mall, I noticed that it didn't "feel" like thunderstorm weather, so I didn't think much of it. However, by the time I made it to my car, there was lightning off in the distance. So I think "Uh oh" and start racing to get home to my dog and cats, thinking they'd be freaked out if the storm was up in our area. As I'm driving home, I can't keep my eyes off the sky, because the lightning show was just too much to handle! I wanted to watch it just go on and on! (I'd like to note that I did not take the above photo - I borrowed it from an online site to use as an illustration of the lightning that we were seeing in our area. It was taken by someone named Vlado Janzekovic.)

So I am driving home, just watching these streaks of lightning flying through the sky every 15 seconds or less. It was unbelieveable! And it didn't stop! The storm started around 8pm or so, and didn't quit until well after midnight! Everytime you'd think it was going away, it would pop right back up again, and it was unbelieveable.

John and I layed in bed last night, and he was telling me about driving home from his rehearsal in Gilford, and how he was seeing the same type of lightning, almost 2 hours after I was seeing it! We tried to remember storms when we were younger, and all we could rememer was these big flashes of light, but rarely being able to see lightning like that. We always pictured that type of lightning to be something you see out over the mid-west some where.

It was kind of neat while it lasted, and I'm glad that if we were going to get a cool heavenly light show like that, it happened at night so we could truely appreciate the awesome power Mother Nature has. That being said, I'm glad it's over too.

I got called back for a second interview at the homeless shelter I interviewed at on Friday. I'm excited that they want me back for another interview, but I'm still nervous about the hours. 4 days a week I'd have to do 7-3, and then one day I'd have to do 3-11pm. I don't really know how I'd work the schedule, so it'll be interesting.

They keep talking about the blizzard on TV but it's stopped snowing here. I don't know if something is going to come this afternoon or not, because they were predicting us to be in the 6-12 inches range, but we've really only seen two and a half or three inches.

I took some pictures of current knitting projects I have going. I'll post those up as soon as I get them on the computer. I started my business website yesterday too. You can see it at:
http://home.metrocast.net/~mscardin/lisknits.htm

John got me flowers for Valentines day, which was nice! Tonight we're going to make a nice dinner. Today we're just home on a snow day, so it's really just kind of like having a Saturday on a Wednesday! I put together a jar of Hershey's Kisses with a note that says "I wanted to give you a kiss for ever time I fell in love with you, but we'd never do anything else. Ever. At all. So this will have to do. I love you." He hasn't read that note yet, and I had to TELL him to open the card! *sigh*

Rain, rain, go away

I am so sick of this rain! It's enough to make a woman crazy! They said the sun may come out for a few hours on Wednesday. For the first time in almost 2 weeks, I think that will make it. There's all this crazy flooding, and I'm going nuts waiting to hear from our realtor who was supposed to put in a call to the selling agent of the house we're buying. Half of Rochester was evacuated, and we're trying to find out what, if any, damage there was to our house! It's something I think we'd be entitled to know about.
Besides, the rain is just depressing. It's so hard to get up and go to work when it's POURING out.
Anyway, I've got to go switch the laundry. Again. Just wanted to make the 2 WEEKS AND COUNTING!!!!!!!!!! post. Because I'm so excited to be in our house!!!

Stressed!

I hate this part of the semester. Someone remind me why I came back to school? Oh yeah, because it's better than what I was doing. Oh well. I've got this research paper for one of my classes that has been taking forever and a day to get decent resources on. Fortunately, I just got back an e-mail from a different professor who was able to give me a couple ideas of where to look. So now I have a 12 page research paper, a paper about 2 AA meetings that I'm supposed to go to that I haven't been to yet, 2 novels to finish, 2 more reaction papers, a paper about one of the novels, not to mention all of the reading to keep me up todate with the lectures. I guess I shouldn't be complaining... just wait until I get into my field study and will still have 3 or 4 classes along with that!

On the up side, I get to register for next semester tomorrow. Yay! Since I came back to school as a senior, I'm pretty much guarenteed to get into the classes I want, which is a good thing, since one of them is Elementary Sign Language/Intermediate Sign Language. I also have to sign up for Human Behavior and Social Environment 1, Research Methods in Social Work and Social Work Practice 1 (which is the pre-req for my field study) and Society and Morals. So I'm pretty psyched because almost all of those are for my major, which is always a nice thing to take classes in.

I was so sad that I didn't get to go to the beach yesterday. It was SOOOO warm out, like 87 or something like that, but I just had too many errands to run and stuff, so I was sad. I'll get over it though. It's not like it will never be warm again.

Okay, I need to go be productive now, since I just finished complaining about all the work I had to do!