Back on the Grid

 Hello Everyone,

Oh, the weather outside has been frightful.  When I wasn't shoveling, I was tucked safely, and warmly inside the cabin.  The big lump in front of the window is the barbeque.

I curled up to read while the storm raged on outside.  

Our teenage grandsons loved sledding and snowboarding down the hill on our lot.  They did not enjoy the trek back up!

Our son did a lot of shoveling and brought wood down to the cabin for us.

Our granddaughter helped me in the kitchen fixing a ton of food to fill this hungry crew.

One of our grandsons cleared the stairs leading down to the generator. These stairs are so icy!  I want to take down the Christmas tree and put all of the decorations away, but I have to walk down the stairs to the storage area under the cabin.  I'm afraid the stairs are an accident waiting to happen.

When our grandson wasn't sledding, he was bundled up in the snow.

I call this picture Dr. Zhivago Sky.  I took this on our afternoon walk around the neighborhood.

The big lump on the right of the picture is our wood pile.  

To backtrack a bit, we spent a wonderful Christmas with our entire family in Livermore at our eldest son's house. We came back up to the cabin the day after Christmas with two grandsons, son, and granddaughter who stayed with us for two days.  They had never seen so much snow here. This is a picture of our son's truck after one day of the storm.  Our car was safely tucked inside the garage.

After our son and the kids left, this is what the driveway looked like.  Would you believe the big lump on the right is our other car!  We won't see it until Spring.

After all of the kids went home, our only contact with the outside world was an emergency radio.  The power, Internet, phone, and TV were out for six days.  The first day was fun, but then it gets a bit old.  Not knowing how long we were going to be without power, we only ran the generator for two hours in the morning and two hours at night.  We wanted to conserve the fuel we had.  The snowplow didn't come through the neighborhood very often, and the roads were too treacherous to venture out, even in 4-wheel drive.

In the evenings, Mr. Joe and I played gin rummy.  It was a good thing we weren't playing strip poker, because I would have been naked as a jay bird!

The only station we could get on the emergency radio was a Country/Western station. We were able to get caught up on the weather forecast and local/national news. We don't usually listen to Country/Western.

Here are some of our favorite lines from some of the songs we listened to.

"She was over me before the grass grew back."

"Bourbon don't burn the way you do."

"So tipsy we can't stop kissing."

"Leavin' town and chasin' sunsets down."

"Kissin' and the crickets is the only sound."

Here are our favorite bits of Country/Western Wisdom.

"We had it all when we didn't have much."  

"You can't buy happiness, but you can buy dirt."

"You're Mozart in the sheets."  (Now we are assuming this means sheet music!)  Silly us. 

This is what happens when you are locked up in solitary confinement for days on end with nothing but your spouse. dog, and a storm raging outside. 

Soon,

Lynn