Finally!

Remember when I complained about all the snowstorm false alarms?

We actually got hit by a good snowstorm!

We had warning several days in advance, but I didn't take them too seriously- the other promised storms never materialized.

Tuesday night it started raining, and within an hour or two it had changed to snow and was building up. The snow was sticking to the trees, making them look ghostly in the darkness.

I woke up about 4:15 to absolute silence. It took me a minute to realize why it was so quiet- the power was out and there was no background hum from the heat pump.

After using the bathroom (a middle of the night ritual now), I laid down and tried to go back to sleep. Before I could though, I saw bright flashes outside. I ran to the window to see what was going on and saw another flash- so bright that after it was over, everything was so much darker, which seemed odd. I watched another flash from a different window, but the light was dispersed by the snow and it was impossible to figure out which direction the flashes were originating from.

I went back to sleep, then woke up an hour or two later. The power was still out, but there were more flashes disturbing the quiet darkness. These were even more spectacular- one in particular started out bright orange then changed to a neon green before disappearing.

There's power lines a couple lots over, and I could hear them surging with each flash. My guess is that the flashes were from workers working on the transformers. Though maybe it was from power lines going down? I've never actually seen power lines pulled down, so I don't know if they give off bright flashes when they have branches fall on them.

The heavy snow didn't do too much damage on our property- a few small branches down and this:

It used to look like this:

I don't think it's going to recover. After shoveling the snow off it popped back up, but now it leans. The fabric had gotten a few tears recently so I was already planning on building a more permanent version, and now it has even more holes. This has been housing our generator and recycling bins, so we can't just chuck it. Good thing our power came back on around 7:30, since it would have been a bit difficult to get to the generator. Guess I'll be breaking out the 2x4's sooner than I thought....

But back to the snow- it snowed all night Tuesday and all morning Wednesday. It started raining a bit in the afternoon, but that didn't last too long, so the snow didn't all melt away like I expected it to.

It's started to melt a little this morning, but so far it's managed to stick around longer than I thought it would.

LMS was happy that we finally got snow wet enough to build a snowman and have a snowball fight.

We did some sledding, but it was less successful. Apparently dry snow is better for sledding and wet snow is better for snowmen.

Yay for snow!