I don’t know about you, but I had a pretty eventful one thanks to the weather. Friday I was up early, as usual, to do my grocery shopping, and it was raining. Late morning the wind started picking up and the temperature began to drop. And the rain started to turn to snow.
The schools had been closed in anticipation of the storm. I have to admit, I thought the school board was jumping the gun considering we were supposed to get a big storm last week and it came to nothing. But the schools were closed, so we had the granddaughter for a while in the afternoon. By the time I took her home, a couple of hours later, we were having white out conditions. The wind was absolutely fierce.
I had one more gift to buy so I thought I’d get it on my way home, but the stores in the strip mall I went to were all dark. At the time I figured everyone closed up early because of the severity of the storm, but I later learned it was because they had no power.
The storm only got worse. We didn’t get all that much snow, but the wind was gusting at over 100 KPH, blowing it around causing white-outs. Most of the town (and surrounding area) was without power. We fortunate that we were in a very narrow, two-block wide corridor that still retained their power.
My elderly father-in-law was unfortunately in one of the sections without power. We weren’t able to get in touch with him Friday night, so Saturday morning I drove over to his house and informed him he was coming home with me. It was 50 F in his house.
The roads weren’t bad on the drive over, but the visibility was. And I was shocked at the number of trees that had been toppled over by the wind. Fir trees. Apparently, the ground was still soft from all the rain we had, and combined with their naturally shallow root system, it didn’t take much to blow them down.
For a while we were worried about our own power because just up the street from us a fir tree had blown over and was resting on some power lines. But to my surprise it wasn’t long before a Hydro truck showed up to cut it free. I gotta say, kudos to Hydro One – those guys went above and beyond. They were real Christmas Angels.
Late evening on Christmas Eve, the hubby took his father back home to pick up some necessities for spending the night, and they discovered the power had been restored. We would have been happy to have him stay the night with us anyway, but he preferred to sleep in his own bed.
The wind continued throughout the night, nicely scouring our driveway clear of snow. We had our traditional Christmas brunch at the daughter’s house, and this time it included a fun game that came with our Christmas crackers. We took turns picking a card, and you had two different choices of what to draw. One of my choices was “goose” and after it was correctly identified, the granddaughter decided to embellish my picture.
Knowing her mother has an aversion to Canadian geese, she added teeth and a Canadian flag to the goose, and the figure of her mother, screaming in fear. LOL
The temperature rose a little, although it was still pretty cold, and the wind began to die down a bit. Christmas dinner was at our house, and I made both a turkey and a ham. Everything went well until . . . I got a phone call after the hubby took his father home. He used my car (as it was bigger) and it died in the father-in-law’s driveway.
This does not bode well for Second Christmas in Hamilton on Thursday.
No comments:
Post a Comment