Babysoroos

And Ahoy Matey!

Today we went to the pumpkin patch with Ben’s preschool. It was a damp day, so we didn’t stay all that long. But we did get a few pumpkins, which we will be carving, and we also got to feel hubbard squash to some very large cows. I think that was the hit of the day, really. Oh, well, that and the cute kittens that followed us around and climbed up people’s legs. 🙂

Timothy saw his first snow last week. It started on Wednesday morning, and by that evening we had about 4 inches. School was cancelled again on Thursday. We all went out to play while it was snowing, even Timothy. He was very well bundled up, but still only out for about 5 minutes. Ben and Dad built a great huge snowman with a very unusual head. 🙂

And yesterday, the temperature was 70ºF. Crazy weather.

View album.

We got snow again a few days ago. This is certainly an unusual winter in the Pacific Northwest. This time, we were able to get out and play in it a bit more — Ben was much more interested in it than he was just a month and a half ago. We even built a snowman! A small snowman, because the snow was so very powdery it didn’t stick together well, but one with a hat and a face and buttons and all that. Identifiably a snowman.

View album.

We’ve had quite an interesting few days!

Rain on Sunday turned to snow, and by mid-afternoon it was lying. We lost power around 3pm. We ventured out for a while to see how widespread it was, and discovered it was basically 10 houses on our lane and that was it. So we ordered pizza for dinner, and when Eric went to pick it up, the downtown area had just lost power too. It came back on at about 7pm, and Ben’s joyful reaction when the lights came back on was “We can open the fridge!” (Oh, how he misses opening the fridge and getting things out when we tape it shut. 🙂 But he does understand that the “electricity is broken” and we cannot open the fridge, and he’s generally pretty good about it.)

Power went off again at 5am on Monday morning. And it was still snowing. Power came back a little before 8am, but went off again at 9:30. Still snowing. Came back around 1pm, but went off again at 3:45pm. Still snowing.

That outage lasted for about 33 hours. We didn’t have power again til about 1:30am Wednesday.

The snow stopped some time on Monday night, we ended up with maybe 8″ or so, and Tuesday was a bright sunny gorgeous freezing cold day. It felt like we were living in a ski lodge. The temperature was down in the mid-twenties.

We’ve been comfortable enough — we have a gas fireplace that heats the living areas, and because of the open loft layout of our house, also heats the bedroom. We have lots of candles and we have a propane camping stove, so really, we’ve been doing alright. The most difficult thing to deal with was getting to be hot water — the water heater is electric, so we were using the hot water sparingly, just enough to take the chill off when washing hands, hoping to make it last. It just barely did. And then today Eric realised we have an on-demand gas water heater in his office. 🙂 So as long as we have propane out there, we can even take showers if the need arises.

There’s another storm coming in tonight, according to the forecast, but it’s looking milder. Maybe another 2″ of snow. We sort of expect to lose power again, but maybe we won’t. It’s not too worrisome though, at least now we know we can handle it. 🙂

And once December gets here, it’s supposed to warm up a little, perhaps it’ll be more typical Northwest weather….just wet.

View the album.