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Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006 - 5:31 p.m. I've been spending a bit of time this morning, going over all of the photos I shot this past week of the ice storm and its aftermath. I think I have around 400 images to work with. So it might take me a little time to completely finish posting the ones I like on this page. Hope I don't bore by sticking with this one subject. Ice storms like this one only happen every 30-40 years around here. That said, I would prefer this to be the last one of this magnitude in my lifetime....
The view from the windshield of my truck, around midnight. The ice had already heavily built up on the exposed surfaces of my truck, since I had been driving in the cold rain for around 5 hours. It took longer for the trees and power lines to have this much ice hanging on them.
Plenty more to come. Hope you don't get sick of me writing about this subject, but the level that this storm has (and still will) effected our lives here is hard to comprehend (unless you are here). The first thing out of anyone we talked to yesterday (while we were out shopping) was "How long was your power out? Did you loose any trees?" I'm kinda ashamed to tell them we kept our power. But since it was down all morning while the fixed the lines yesterday, I told everyone that we had our power out for a while. After they tell you there's was out for 6 days, you don't want to gloat. Oh yeah- yesterday was the first day I turned my Christmas display back on outside our house. Having that turned on while any of our neighbors were sitting in the cold, powerless, would have been like rubbing salt into their wounds.... We did manage to take a break from the storm cleanup this morning, and went to brunch with Lease's side of the family. The occasion? Celebrating the birthdays of Lease's sister Jules (age not revealed) and our nephew Tyler (23- he's still young enough to not mind telling you his age). The food was decent, the company great. We tied up a group of tables for about 2 hours. The restaurant wasn't very busy, so they didn't seem to mind our camping out. After a couple of errands, I loaded my chainsaw into the non-Hillbilly truck and headed over to my sister's house. She had the top half of her 100 year old shag bark hickory tree snap off in the icestorm, and she doesn't have a chainsaw that runs anymore. I was able to chop the heavy wood into firewood sized chunks in about an hour. Left her the branches- she said she didn't mind dragging them to the curb for some exercise some day soon. I ended up with a half-filled pickup of primo firewood from that stop. From there, I drove over to Jules' house. She had a large section of her old 50' tall magnolia split and fall onto her roof. She had a professional take the split area down, and they stacked it neatly at her curb. I filled the rest of my truckload with 4' sections of that magnolia. Cut them into spliting-sized chunks in our alley, and piled all of the wood up at my splitting stump. There will be several evenings worth of maul-swinging in the future. But my woodplie will be totally full after the winter, once I am done with the work. For now, I'll just have to pile the new wood up near the woodpile. All that cutting and dragging has left me dead tired. Nothing like a bunch of heavy labor to remind me how bad of shape I have become. The 30 minute walks (on the sidewalk and on the treadmill) that I take pretty regularly for exercise have not kept me in the condition I was in, back when I was younger. I'll pay for this with sore muscles bones tomorrow.....
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Around 3 am on the night of the ice storm, just before the rain finally switched over to snow. If you look at the image in full size (click on the link below the photo), you can see how long the ice sickles had become on the power lines. The tree on the right shattered once the snow added more weight to the branches- about 1/3rd of the tree was lost.
