Well Peter and I have been wishing like 8 year old children for a blizzard. Seriously. We must've been stuck in the little kid mentality. Being homeowners makes us look at snow in a whole new light.
The forecast showed the potential for lots of snow. We were hoping they were right. Well, they were! It started coming down on Friday when I was at lunch with the girls from work. By the time Peter picked me up on Friday, there were a few inches on the ground. The roads were very messy so we headed straight home. We made dinner and were watching movies and hanging out and the power kept flickering on and off. Around midnight the power went out for good. We decided to head to bed and hope that it would come back on during the night. No such luck. We woke up freezing in the middle of the night. I grabbed an extra blanket and threw it on the bed. When we woke up again in the morning, we were even more cold! We keep our house cold to begin with (63 degrees at night) so by the time 8 hours had passed, it had dropped to 52 degrees!
We were kind of bummed that the power hadn't come back on because that meant no heat, no stove/oven using since we have electric, and the possibility of freezing pipes. We decided to head outside for a bit and at least start to shovel out a bit.
Here I am bundling up!
What we saw when we went outside was truly a winter wonderland.
This is from our bedroom window. Our car is buried under there somewhere.
Another view from our bedroom window.
Everywhere we looked there was just so. much. SNOW.
Our street was very quiet. No one was up yet and since the plow hadn't hit our street yet, no one could drive on our block.
Here you can see how much snow piled up on our a/c unit. Also, that poor tree doesn't look like it's going to make it.
The snow was up to my knees!
We have a bird bath in our back yard that we usually measure snow by. You can't even see it here! That's what 20+ inches will do!
There was just snow everywhere! This is our grill area. Look at how the pine tree is drooping from the weight of the snow. Some of the branches from this tree were touching the ground. They are usually 8 feet above it!
Our chimney that you can barely see.
More drooping branches. We were worried that some of the bigger trees in our yard might topple over!
We came inside a little bit later to see if the power had been restored. Still no luck. Peter ate some cereal while I caught up on some sleep. We had to keep adding blankets to the bed because it was just so cold! We went outside mid-afternoon to continue digging out. The sun had come out and so had many of our neighbors. Everyone was chattering about the shock of how much snow we got and what to do. Many neighbors had fireplaces or gas stoves and were keeping warm. (We were a bit jealous!) We did have one neighbor who set out on foot with his wife to a close-by street that had been plowed to get picked up to go to his sister's place to wait out the power outage.
Here we are in the backyard. We figured we should take a picture since it was a memorable occasion.
Here's a little tunnel from us walking through from the front of the house to the back.
The sun was so bright as it reflected off of the snow!
After over 2 hours of digging at the car alone, this is the progress we made. A bit disheartening haha.
The sun melted some of the snow in the trees and on the porch roof. At one point we heard this loud noise that turned out to be all of the snow from the porch roof falling onto the ground. In the process, this poor shrub was crushed!
Here you can see all of the snow had fallen from the porch roof.
Here's one of the big pines in our yard so heavy laden with snow.
Beautiful dogwood branches covered in snow with the blue sky in the background.
Our street still had not been plowed. You can see some adventurous folks with 4 wheel drive had passed through though.
The other side of the street:
We decided that since our power had not come back on by 3 PM, we would need to make some sort of plan. We couldn't stay at our house with the constant dropping temperature and no one to stay warm. We checked our electric company via our iPhones and the number of affected customers kept rising so there wasn't really an end in sight to know when our power would be restored. We had great friends offer to let us come to their place. We decided to pack an overnight back just in case and headed out to dig out the car the rest of the way. As we were putting our boots back on, the power came back on! But then it went off. We had hope because at least that meant they were working on it! We decided to head out and dig out the car more and wait to see if the power stayed on. About 30 minutes later we checked and still had power! We were so excited! We called our friends to let them know we wouldn't need to make the mile trek through the snow.
Here's the car after a total 3 hours of focused efforts on digging it out! Unfortunately we didn't know until this morning that it would require an additional 1.5 hours to dig out the tire area and be able to actually get out of the driveway! We headed out a bit before church to make sure we could get out. Good thing we didn't get ready for church first!
Here's us again. Crazy and exhausted from the digging and shoveling. But happy to have power again!
We took hot showers, made a hot meal, and vegged out the rest of the day. I can certainly say that is one birthday I'll never forget!
