Me Voy

This year we said goodbye to the 2x4 and railroad tie and got an ice eater to do the breaking for us

Everyone is talking about snow.  How much did you get ?, how long did it take you to get home? etc etc. Some of these answers are more exciting then others, like, "it took me 8 hours to get home, and I live 45 min. away". Now I don't mean me, no I left work early to avoid the insanity that  seemed inevitable after all the stewing and brewing going on over the radio, TV and internet, concerning the upcoming storm. Yup I was safely aboard when the wind, snow, and thunder hit. You heard right, thunder and lightning made an appearance during this snow storm. Eerie right?

Was that thunder?

The big story wasn't so much the amount of snow but its weight. This was a wet heavy snow, that broke a lot of tree limbs and snapped some power lines. We were lucky enough to be in the power out zone and got our first taste of off the grid living in Tara.

Unlike Me Voy, Tara is an electric baby. We have done some things to improve that situation, like switching most of our lights, and all our  pumps to 12 v, but everything else including heat, cooking stove and even our speakers are 120v. Cooking and heat were easy to take care of. We pulled out our trusty propane  Coleman stove  to make dinner and used the kerosene heater we use on the back deck for heat. It worked great keeping us at an average of 64. Travis even jury rigged a carbon monoxide detector we had lying around to avoid that death thing that we hear can sometimes be a problem.

Kerosene heater , 12 volt lights and cake. Power outage what power outage? 

Jury rigged carbon monoxide detector 

All in all being forced off the grid  ( 26 hrs. in total) taught us some things.  For one we really need a
"green" way to charge our mobile devices. I ended up charging our internet hot spot and phones at work,  but that just won't do - I am after all, aiming for early retirement! Two, we really need some 12 v speakers in here, and three living on a boat is  better then living in a house. My co- workers talked of stumbling around in the dark and cold, and, although I don't usually like to compare myself to others to make myself feel better, I couldn't resist being a little smug as I thought about our warm and bright little nest floating somewhere out there in the darkness. Don't worry though, that smugness soon evaporated as I realized how far we still  have to go to voluntarily disconnect ourselves from that little spinning meter.