Thinking about all our New England members, along with the folks in New York who are without power right now!

Hope everyone else is hanging in there! What are you doing to get through? Yabbit???Soxmom, GG, and others???

We're running a generator a few hours a day to power up the fridge and freezer, recharge the laptop battery, and inviting neighbors to stop in and warm up and have a hot drink. We heat with wood so we have heat and a place to cook, a BBQ for grilling on, doing a lot of one pot meals and using up perishables in the fridge, not opening the freezer at all, drawing water from the well by hand (we have an old pitcher pump that we hook up when this stuff happens), oil lamps and candles and flashlights for light, generally just staying comfortable and warm, but we are used to this! We even still have a rotary dial phone, one of those old black heavy jobbers that works no matter what! Lots of people get the new phones and don't realize that they won't work without power!

Most of the neighbors have similar setups but there are a few who have no alternate power source OR heat source and they are sticking it out too! We took the generator around to their places to help get their fridges up to temp, run their pump so they could get some water stocked up for drinking, washing and to flush with () and lent them camp stoves to cook on. Others with portable generators are doing the same. It's pretty cool to have neighbors who help out! One of ours brought his chainsaw down and cut up all the branches and trees that fell on my road so I could get out and helped to remove branches that were hanging on the wires so when the power comes back on, we get it too!

I have no year round neighbors close to me, so I went around and did a survey of the summer places on my road and called the people with their damage reports and let them know what we had done to make sure that they would have no fires or wind/cold damage from broken windows, etc.

A birch tree fell on my garage but it did no damage and was gone the next day after the neighbor cut it up! We already stacked that wood and it will make a lovely summer fire next year, and we will drink a glass of wine and tell some "Remember when" stories about the Great Ice Storm of 2008!