Well, the first week of February was very nice. A little snow here, a little snow there. Just enough to be pretty. Then, we got over 5 inches in one night. It was all powder, wouldn't even stick together enough to make snowballs (or anything else). But it would have been perfect for skiing/snowboarding. If we had more than just ski poles (like, actual skis). It stayed around until the 11th or 12th, and then evaporated without melting. Weird.



























Annora walked most of a mile down the mountain to try to get to the mailbox before Brian got home. We almost made it, too. But we had several distractions along the way (icicles and sledding and tracking animals. Brian drove us back to the house.




















This last weekend, the dogs got loose and took off down the road. They came back that night, cold, hungry, and with cuts all over their feet from ice and rocks.
Two days later they got loose again (Annora!). The weather was cold and very, very windy. Night came and they didn't come back. Wind chill was in the negative 20's F. They were out all night. We were really worried because Lucy (the white dog) doesn't have much of a winter coat.
But Sunday morning, they came rolling back in to the house.
Lucy started acting mousy and had trouble being stiff.













Caspian (The big bone-head) was fine, just extra hungry.











Sunday (2-11-07), Lucy got worse. She had a hard time getting her back legs to move.
Monday morning she couldn't even walk. We decided to get her in to the Vet ASAP.
It turns out that Lucy Has Lyme (Lyme's?) disease.
Vet gave us medicine. We took her home.
About one hour after her first dose, she was jumping around and running up and down the stairs. Amazing!




All day Tuesday (2-13-07), we had freezing rain.
Not surprisingly, the power went out this morning (2-14-07) at about 3am.
Bummer.



















Brian went to work late(had to cancel his first class) because even on the gravel, there was so much ice that it was like a bumpy skating rink.



This evening at around 5pm the electricity came back on! Hooray!
Annora and I had been camped out in the master bedroom with the dogs all day. Fun, fun. But warm.













After Brian left, the wind started blowing pretty good (30mph, gusting 45-50mph). The ice on the trees began to crack off and fly at about a 30-40 degree angle towards (you guessed it) or house. We could hear loud backs and cracks. Annora got scared and I became nervous. The dogs were restless. But our house is still in one piece! Not a single broken window! Wow! Thank you Jesus! I fully expected the sliding glass doors to get smacked and break, but they didn't!



The smaller pieces were pea-sized. The ones that made us nervous were softball-sized to football sized. The biggest one I saw was a long, skinny piece (about 4" or 5" wide) that was almost as tall as me (so, about 4 1/2 or 5 feet long). Yikes! Most pieces were around the size of regular ice cubes, or around the size of a golfball.



To get an idea of how it sounded (and sounds as I'm writing this), imagine baseballs being thrown by the hundreds at your house, even the windows, and shattering as they fall (or are blown) so that they hit the window or wall a second time. (I wish I could record the sound. It's tinkley and neat sounding--I could incorporate it into a cool piece of music.)


This evening around dusk there was about 1 1/2 inches of ice on our deck, just from the trees!
But it could always be worse...we could live in New York or Minnesota!!! (Those poor people.)