Rain to Snow...

The weather has been dreary today. It rained all day. The temperature started to drop and I didn't think anything of it when the furnace kicked on.

Then it started to snow.

This isn't normally that big of a deal, considering in VT, this first snow was a little overdue (typically, we get a light snow and it melts). However, I looked out at the tree right next to the house that hasn't shed it's leaves and the really large heavy snowflakes falling and thought "uh, oh".

The problem is that heavy snow, although excellent for snowman, snowball fights, etc, sticks to everything. If a tree that has leaves that seems stubbornly stuck to the tree, then the snow collects on those leaves, putting more weight than the tree can tolerate. If the branches are quite strong, the entire tree would come down and hit everything in its path. In this case, the kitchen and the livingroom.

Fortunately, the bedrooms that we are currently sleeping in is out of harm's way - I think.

I had open the door later in the evening to check on the tree. Sure enough, the branches were bowed and the snow was collecting on the leaves. All around I can hear branches creaking and breaking, both near and far.

A few branches have (and still are) breaking off the tree and bouncing off the roof. They're not very large branches, but they make quite the racket on their way down. I was a nervous wreck.

That isn't the end of my worries. The lights flickered a few times as I was getting ready for bed. I grabbed my book light (which makes a terrible booklight but a wonderful flashlight and portable deskligh because it's so cumbersome) and decided to try to take a shower.

I wasn't worried about the shower stopping, since the water is gravity fed city water and the hot water heater is designed to keep the heat for a long period of time. But the bathroom is one of the darkest rooms in the house, even in the daytime. So the booklight/flashlight would have been handy if the power were to go out.

It didn't. I did take some precautions and put blankets over the windows upstairs in the bedrooms that we are sleeping in so that if we do lose power overnight, the heat wouldn't so quickly be sucked out the glass (glass is a terrible insulator against heat) and we don't freeze to death.

Typically, the power doesn't stay out for long in town. So I'm not too worried about trying to find another place to stay, even though my parents have wood heat and live only 5 miles away. Of course, we are borrowing their kerosene heater. So we could use that to keep the basement warm so that the pipes don't freeze.

But I have been informed that it's supposed to get "warmer" this week - at least warm enough to melt the snow. So I'm not worried about literately freezing, anyway.