The Ice Storm

This is old news now, but I thought I'd post some pictures of the ice storm.  The ones that I took didn't really do it justice.  I should have taken more when the sun was shining, but for some reason I didn't.

A shrub in the Bittersweet family Euonymus Atropurpureos as far as we can figure.

Sky starting to clear

Blackberries

And more blackberries

Did I ever tell you we have a lot of blackberries?😉

The old hay baler encased in ice

Stucco wire sculptures

When the sun shone on it all, it was ABSOLUTELY STUNNING!!

This picture does not do it justice, but you get the idea.  Driving past blueberry fields, or scrubby brush, or just about anything with the sun shining through and reflecting off the ice, was just incredible.

Bella said she would stay inside and admire it from a warm spot

The flowering cherry at the back of the house.

The other side of the tree at night with the moon shining through it.  Now I should have used a tripod to get a clear picture, but interesting all the same.

The ice storm was over on Saturday, Dec 30.  We got our power back on after 53 hours on New Years Eve. Our neighbours got it a little sooner, but because our power line had been ripped off the pole, we became an outage of one.  Fortunately we didn't have to wait much longer.  I heard of two different people who were still waiting for theirs a week later!

The ice didn't really start to melt much until Thursday.  There were piles of ice under the trees.  I picked up a couple of branches to show the thickness of the ice. 

An ice caterpillar!

It was an inch thick on these two branches.  

Look how skinny the caterpillar branch is!

Lots of icicles on the windward side of the house

I stole the next four pictures off the internet.  Bradner Rd is to the east of us and a little higher,  and probably more open to the east wind, and they were hit with more ice than us.  I drove along it Tuesday last week in the early morning sunshine.  I had an appointment so had no time to stop, but it was just stunning!  The chainlink fence around the tennis courts was a sheet of ice.

I passed fences that looked like this!

I didn't see this, but isn't it just magical?

And the poor linemen that had to work in conditions like this!  

A big thank you!!

Red sky at morning......

The whole ice storm, tree falling over, power outage has a chapter two.  When the big maple tree at the bottom of the driveway came down, it bumped the power pole, which made it lean slightly.  This made the line that crossed the road in front of us hang a bit lower.  It did get mentioned to a couple of the crews....

Anyway, as of Friday it was still doing okay, was still there.  It was the internet/landline/cablevision line.  We were doing our usual end of the afternoon dog walk around the block.  We got up to the corner where we turn down a lane, and where we take the dogs off leash.  There was a large tractor trailer coming down the road and turning the corner to head past our house.  I looked at it and said, 'do you think this will be the one that takes out the line?'  Larry joked about running down there to see, and I said that I think we will know.... And there was the most incredible boom and flash, the dogs bolted (not far, they were okay), and we knew it wasn't good.  We walked the other three sides of the block and on the last stretch talked to neighbours who had either walked up to the corner or were stood looking.  The truck had ripped out the line and broken both the pole at the bottom of our driveway and the one across the road.  By the time we got to our corner the firetruck was there and we couldn't go through because of the downed lines.  We had to detour through a neighbour's field, cross our road behind the firetruck, climb the gate into the field next door to us, walk along the fence line and ended up walking to the bush and scrambling through there in the dark(thank goodness for the snow still on the ground to light it up a bit). The fence was either hidden in the blackberries or was that 'non climbable' stuff with holes too small to get the toe of your boot in, and we weren't agile enough to get over it.  We would have had to heave the dogs over as well.  

Anyway, we got back to the house and of course had no power once again. The weekend before we had been loaned a generator Saturday evening.  We hadn't returned it yet, so fired it up once again and sat with a lamp on and watched the tv (we don't have cable vision, just use a roof top aerial that David calls 'peasant vision'). Hydro showed up a bit later and were there all night working to replace the two poles and the lines and our power was back on again by 6 in the morning.  We were impressed!  Unfortunately for our neighbours that live on the block across from us, the internet/landline/cable line didn't get replaced for a couple of days. Our internet was fixed later Saturday morning, and since we don't have a landline or cablevision, we were okay.

It will be a winter we won't forget for a while.  

We still have our arch.  We are still hoping that someone might take it down for us, but not sure that is going to happen. I won't bore you with the stories that go with that.  

We've finally had some dry hours the last couple of days, so have been picking away at getting the driveway cleaned up.  Lots of large branches to be sawn up, without touching the arch. The maple is nice to split for the most part.  I like the challenge of trying to split some of the ones that are awkward shapes, but I also know when to give up on them!

So there you are, I've probably bored you once again. 

This photo was from this afternoon. 

Do you like the prop under the arch? 

Ha, it's kind of a joke!

Meredith had said we should prop that side up and make it like the entrance way to a ranch. 

I think this is as close as we'll get!