Snowtober: Wrap Up

On the afternoon of Saturday October 29th, a historic Nor'easter hit Connecticut, dumping between 6"-22" across the state.  Although the snowfall at our house was minimal (about 6"-8" inches), we lost power at 8:30 pm on Saturday evening and it was 116 hours before it was restored, late Thursday afternoon.  The peak number of outages in Connecticut topped out at more than 884,000 customers (easily 1.5 million people), far greater than the historic numbers from Hurricane Irene, just two short months ago; as I write this post, more than 280,000 households are still without electricity.  On Sunday morning, our entire area (for tens of miles) was without power and without heat.  We had cranked up the heat in our house before we lost power on Saturday, so we had a bit of cushion but when the temperatures plummeted into the 20's during the overnight on Saturday and Sunday, there was no way to keep the house warm.  By Monday morning, the house was 52 degrees and the temperatures continued to drop each day.  Despite the temperature, and the fact that you could see your breath when getting dressed in the morning, the girls amazed us with their resilience.  They barely uttered a complaint.  In fact, we think that they secretly like having no electricity - we went out to breakfast almost every morning (to get warm), they came to work with me twice, went to the movies and showered at the Y, all of which are high on the fun meter for them.  They are very special people and we are truly blessed to have them.
Lee and I decided that we needed to get ourselves, the girls and dogs through the power outage before we turned to the other major issue - our backyard.  But now that electricity has been restored, we have some work ahead of us.  We lost many branches, some small trees, and more than 50% of a large, beautiful old red maple tree.  Honestly, it brought me to tears when I saw the damage done to this tree and to our yard.  Yet again, however, we know how lucky we are that there was no damage to our home - and that people have it so much worse than us.  Below are some images from the historic storm (to quote our governor, the last time a storm like this happened in October in Connecticut was "never") and there is a link to more photos on the sidebar.

On Saturday afternoon, the snowfall was lovely - but you can see that even early on, the limbs were weighed down by the weight of the snow (you can't even see the clubhouse portion of the swing set). 

Our area got very little snow in comparison to the rest of the state, but it was more than enough.

The blood maple in our front yard was sagging from the weight of the snow. 

The red maple in our backyard took a beating.

You can't even imagine the sounds these limbs made when they broke off. 

As soon as the snow melted, these limbs sprang back off of the power lines. 

The girls really enjoyed playing in snow on Sunday morning. 

Lee buried all of our food in coolers and lidded containers and covered them in snow.

Sunday night dinner on the grill = all of the perishables from the refrigerator, including eggs, hotdogs, bacon and chicken. 

Covered in blankets on the couch, Emily fell in love with her Leapster all over again (unfortunately)... 

...and Elizabeth spent the week doing what she does best - reading. 

With the snow melted, the damage to the tree is much more stark. 

Lucky for us, this limb was almost completely weighed down with snow before it landed on the porch room - the sound of it snapping was thunderous, but there was no damage. 

Our backyard.