Nature is Cruel

In a cruel twist, nature dumped three days of mostly frozen “rain” on us. It began on Friday, a work day for me. Jon has been driving me to work on Fridays for nearly a year now as we think riding the Max is unsafe in an uncontrolled pandemic. So this Friday was only different due to the two inches of snow, freezing drizzle, and a colleague’s request for a ride. It felt like such a heroine feat just to get to and from work! I was grateful that I didn’t have any other scheduled work days. “I can ride this out” I thought.

Cue dramatic music…

Saturday morning our world was encased in no less than an inch of ice. I did a workout in my iPad, then took a hot shower. Less than twenty minutes later the power went out. It has been out since. I thought the house was a bit chilly before my shower, so I turned on the fireplace, after we lost power, it went out too. We thought our gas fireplace was not operational without electricity. So the next 28 hours got colder and colder. We dressed in 3-4 layers and covered with blankets, hoping for the power to come back.

Eventually I got cold enough to start looking for ideas. I thought about building a real legit fire in my gas fireplaces (yep, we have 2). In researching this terrible desperate idea, I learned that most gas fireplaces can work without electricity. So then I went down the rabbit hole trying to figure out why mine were not working. Turns out the previous owner left batteries in the back up trays. Those batteries corroded, badly, everywhere. We replaced the batteries and cleaned up as best we could, no luck. I was just about to take up my terrible plan when I decided to look up how to clean alkaline corrosion. Vinegar. Blessed vinegar! Scrubbed then down with vinegar and voila, heat.

Then I felt pretty stupid, but warm.

The next day I was boiling more water to clean dishes when I got another notion. Why not run the hot water out? Let’s just see what we got?

Yeah, so the water heater is gas. No electricity required. Boom baby! Heat and hot water! Happy Valentines Day!

In a hot minute all the ice melted, but still no power. We finally were able to walk the dogs too. And our neighborhood is a wreck. Huge trees down everywhere! Two days later, and there are two in particular blocking 2 ways out from our house. There is no sign of power anytime soon. Tomorrow, sort out the freezers. I think we might have gotten away with 2 maybe 3 days, but 4 is a hard stop. Everything has to be eaten or tossed.