Ice Ice Baby

 

Well, THAT was quite a winter storm! The ice storm started on Thursday and we are finally thawing out today on Monday. If knowledge is power, I was a dum-dum for just a couple of days, and we couldn’t get our car out of our driveway for a couple more. It got pretty chilly in the house, but mostly I’m feeling pretty relaxed and extremely grateful. We had water. We had gas.

Well, my friends, we all know that when you live at our house, we always have gas.

It’s just Albert and me and the two little doggos at home now, so we all just snuggled up and did what we could with the lanterns that my Boy Scout husband always has prepared. We’re seasoned Oregonians now, so we know how to boil water and make pour-over coffee, and basically that’s about all you really need to have a pretty good day. We scrounged food that we could cook on the stove. We ate Boom Pop and Kettle Chips. We took lots of naps. No bigs.

Compare this to Arctic Blast of 2008 when my kids were 8, 9, and 11 with school shut down for weeks before Christmas break. This sounds like a legit ClubMed vacation compared to pandemic standards. I cannot tell you how many times each day I raise up my thanks to God that I do not have small children….or large children….or any children at home right now. The Lord knows me and understands that this would ruin me. I barely made it out of 2008, but you'd never know it by these pictures I dug up.

This is Albert heading off to work. He's walking down to the car that he  parked down at the bottom of the hill. He will drive this car a couple of miles to Safeway where he will park and catch the bus that will take him up, up, up the windy, icy hills of Portland to the VA Medical Center. Look at all that black hair and energy!

There was MUCH more snow back then. I think that well over a foot dropped down. The kids and I spent a lot of time outside burning off The Wiggles.

Chris’s kindergarten teacher told us about a trip she took to Sweden where they learned how to make igloos by piling up snow, dousing it with water, then digging out the middle. So we gave it a try and this is what we came up with.

Pretty neat, huh? We had tried making an igloo with bricks that we shaped from empty tubs of baby wipes. After a lot of work, we ended up with quite an impressive large, circular wall, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it into an igloo shape without it caving in.

There were also enough days and enough snow to make a good-sized snowman that lived on our driveway for about a week.

We spent a lot of time outside sledding on the hill on our street. There was enough snow to make a jump in the middle of the street. We yelled at anyone driving down the street, “DON’T WRECK THE JUMP!” We even created banks in front of the brick mailboxes that line the road to avert serious brain damage. I suppose we could have strapped on some bike helmets, but I didn’t think of that until just right now.

This year’s storm brought a lot of tree damage all over town. While it caused some anxiety to have giant hunks of ice and branches falling on the house, it looks like our roof is just fine. Here are some of the chunks Albert picked up from the yard today.

And also notice his poor, injured thumb. Some of my friends had no power all weekend and are still without power. Some of my friends have electric water pumps so they also don’t have water. Some of my friends have fancy electric toilets, so they also can’t go poop. That’s stressful.

I’ll leave you with a little video clip from this morning when the sun came out and all the ice started melting off the trees. This went on for a couple of hours, and there were thuds on our roof that shook the whole house.

We wouldn’t let the poor dogs outside for fear that they would be ice bombed. One time after a hail storm I went outside to survey the yard and a dead squirrel rolled right off the roof. What a gross way to die.

Since I don’t want to end on such a morbid note, and I’m not sure what else to talk about besides squirrels now that we got here somehow, I’d like to share another video with you that I captured while sitting at my kitchen table. These two little squirrels were playing on our deck when one of the little squirrel friends met a hilarious end.

I hope your creature comforts are returned soon if they aren’t already. Thank you for reading, my friends!