a walk about this morning
Friday, April 8, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
the great power outage
So a few days ago we had some wicked weather hit the northern bits of Georgia as a system went across the southeast. Our county even had two tornadoes recorded and manthing said he saw more damage than he has ever seen here aside from the blizzard of 93. I wouldn't know since I haven't left the mountain nor was I here in 93. I do know that we had no damage here on the property other than typical dead fall that comes with gale or hurricane force winds but we did lose power for about 40 hours.
I love power outages. The silence that comes with them is comforting to me in a bizarre sort of way. Manthing, on the other hand, misses his white noise in the background of everything. While we have no real "what we learned from the power outage" things to babble on about we do have a few new observations.
First of all sweet tea would become a winter time occasional treat. It simply is not the same drink when it is luke warm as it is with ice in it. I reckon because of our weather pattern here in the south it would become a winter holiday treat. This is not such a bad thing, water is certainly more healthy and a gallon of sweet tea a day, every day, all year long cuts into the sugar supply. Long term storage of sugar just got a whole lot longer term. This would also mean more frequent trips to the spring to fetch water so it is beneficial to our health in several ways.
There really is no such thing as silence any more. Once the power goes out and everyone realizes it will be out for longer than a few minutes everyone cranks up their generator, except for us but that is another story. Since this outage was due to powerful winds: chainsaws, wood chippers and back up beacons could be heard from all directions.
The internet was of course gone too. I cannot say that I missed it one little iota, sorry folks! Even knowing that I was going to have late assignments and be backlogged on school work, I did not miss it and was actually feeling rather blessed by the whole thing. Lately, I have been having the urge to disconnect for a few days and have some down time but because of school and life I couldn't. This left me no alternative, thank you, Mother!!
Refrigerators for people living a lifestyle like we are by enlarge energy pigs! I needed to move two items from the fridge to the big freezer during the outage. Mayonnaise and goat milk. Everything else in there could sit there without worry. The big freezer had not begun to defrost during the 40 hours so we now know that should we ever lose power for a long period, we would have plenty of time to process any foods in the freezer.
Painting is rather fun in near dark conditions. Since I had no school work to be doing, no researching to be done, no news hounding, and no loafing around the interwebs I had oodles of time on my hands. Since the weather was still craptacular I had to find things to keep me busy inside. I noticed i had about a quart of that orange paint left and had about a quart of old yellow paint so I mixed the two and painted the kitchen. It isn't what I would call pretty as the kitchen has poor natural lighting on dark days and I could barely see what I was painting or how it covered but it sure is brighter and has a happier feeling to it.
Finally, why oh why is there always one "camper" in the campground that has the need to run their generator around the clock? They are not only loud and obnoxious but when gas is near four bucks a gallon, how is it economical to do? Everyone else runs one for a couple hours in the morning and a couple hours in the evening but you Mr. generator man. His is still running through the woods and we have been thinking about going for a walk and telling him that the power is back on or that teotwawki has been canceled but perhaps he is still cut off from the world.
As for us proper polish hippie hillbilly types, we pulled the generator out this morning once the power came back on to test it and make sure it still ran.
I love power outages. The silence that comes with them is comforting to me in a bizarre sort of way. Manthing, on the other hand, misses his white noise in the background of everything. While we have no real "what we learned from the power outage" things to babble on about we do have a few new observations.
First of all sweet tea would become a winter time occasional treat. It simply is not the same drink when it is luke warm as it is with ice in it. I reckon because of our weather pattern here in the south it would become a winter holiday treat. This is not such a bad thing, water is certainly more healthy and a gallon of sweet tea a day, every day, all year long cuts into the sugar supply. Long term storage of sugar just got a whole lot longer term. This would also mean more frequent trips to the spring to fetch water so it is beneficial to our health in several ways.
There really is no such thing as silence any more. Once the power goes out and everyone realizes it will be out for longer than a few minutes everyone cranks up their generator, except for us but that is another story. Since this outage was due to powerful winds: chainsaws, wood chippers and back up beacons could be heard from all directions.
The internet was of course gone too. I cannot say that I missed it one little iota, sorry folks! Even knowing that I was going to have late assignments and be backlogged on school work, I did not miss it and was actually feeling rather blessed by the whole thing. Lately, I have been having the urge to disconnect for a few days and have some down time but because of school and life I couldn't. This left me no alternative, thank you, Mother!!
Refrigerators for people living a lifestyle like we are by enlarge energy pigs! I needed to move two items from the fridge to the big freezer during the outage. Mayonnaise and goat milk. Everything else in there could sit there without worry. The big freezer had not begun to defrost during the 40 hours so we now know that should we ever lose power for a long period, we would have plenty of time to process any foods in the freezer.
Painting is rather fun in near dark conditions. Since I had no school work to be doing, no researching to be done, no news hounding, and no loafing around the interwebs I had oodles of time on my hands. Since the weather was still craptacular I had to find things to keep me busy inside. I noticed i had about a quart of that orange paint left and had about a quart of old yellow paint so I mixed the two and painted the kitchen. It isn't what I would call pretty as the kitchen has poor natural lighting on dark days and I could barely see what I was painting or how it covered but it sure is brighter and has a happier feeling to it.
Finally, why oh why is there always one "camper" in the campground that has the need to run their generator around the clock? They are not only loud and obnoxious but when gas is near four bucks a gallon, how is it economical to do? Everyone else runs one for a couple hours in the morning and a couple hours in the evening but you Mr. generator man. His is still running through the woods and we have been thinking about going for a walk and telling him that the power is back on or that teotwawki has been canceled but perhaps he is still cut off from the world.
As for us proper polish hippie hillbilly types, we pulled the generator out this morning once the power came back on to test it and make sure it still ran.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
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