When we left the house around noon to bring Danny down to Chuck E. Cheese's for his birthday party, the power had been out for nearly 36 hours. We camped out last night in the living room to take advantage of the heat from the wood stove. Without electricity we have also been without any other source of heat and without running water. As I write this, we're still at the Seacoast and have no way of knowing if the house is still dark.
The ice storm that started all of this arrived as freezing rain on Thursday afternoon. By the end of the night the trees, power lines, and power poles were so coated with heavy ice that they started breaking and falling, and by morning more than 250,000 customers of Public Service of New Hampshire were without power.
The sheer scope of this ice storm is amazing enough, but it comes on the heels of a disorienting roller-coaster ride of weather, and even during the course of the storm the changes have been startling. After living with ice-covered trees all Friday morning, we watched as the sun came out in the early afternoon and the ice started shedding. It came down as if the trees were raining, and there were rivers of water running down the trunks. Although sheltered areas still have ice-covered trees, the trees on our property are now completely dry.
The trees along the road that are still covered with ice made a lovely light show in this morning's sun, without the spectacular shedding, because this morning the temperature was in the teens instead of the thirties. The storm has been very inconvenient, but still fascinating.
But if the power outage part of the story is over when we get home tonight, I won't complain.
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