Cold, Snowy, Examy.

Fact rundown:

• Still no power.


• The cats and I are firmly ensconced at my parents' house, which has had power throughout. It sucks a ton.
  
• Rich has been bouncing back and forth between my parents (all clear), his parents (lost power for a while but have it back now and are hosting the fish), and our house, to watch out for looters, scam artists, freezing pipes and falling limbs - so far none of any of that.


• The town of Holden has been BLOWING UP my email with updates, for which I commend them. Last estimate was that 55% of the town was up, and our neighborhood was very hard hit...so badly so that the Governor came to visit and the National Guard has been out and about there.


• This week's forecast includes freezing rain and snow. It snowed today.

That's my hand, holding a piece of the branch that came down in the driveway. I have small hands but that's ridiculous. Part of why there is only 55% power right now is the way the electrical infrastructure grabbed its ankles for this storm. We heard at one point that 80% of the infrastructure was damaged, and even MORE of a problem is this kind of stuff...if you can't see what's going on here, the electric meter has been ripped off of this house. You probably have not considered this, but if this happens to you? It's YOUR job to fix it. So the whole street could be lit up, but you'd be shit out of luck because your damn meter's sitting on your driveway.

Aaaaaaand here's the larger problem. It's like this EVERYWHERE. Some brave/stupid souls tied plastic bags and stuff on downed lines that were overhanging the roads so you could see them as you drove past. While I roll my eyes in the direction of their potential electrocution, I also appreciate not being garrotted as I drive through the streets in the dark.

You can see some of the damage to the treeline here. Once everything stopped being so horrid it was all quite beautiful. You can see how quickly this came up; there are still some leaves I would have expected to have fallen off. NB: I went to Frankercize at 5:30 on Thursday, and it was deserted...making fun of the dumb reasons people call out (fog, drizzle, dog ate homework, etc.) is something of a pasttime at Frankercize, and at that time, it was doing NOTHING but raining, so we spent some time making fun of the call-out folks. I left Frank's at 6:45 or so. At 12:15, our power was out.

This is looking up the main street that OUR street is off of. Lots of stuff down.

This is a really beautiful tree on the corner of our street and Hemlock. It actually sprang back pretty well once the ice melted, but there is another stunning tree behind it that just got decimated. Really sad, but so pretty, no?
This was the worst hit house we saw...it's around the corner from us. This giant tree split in three, then fell on their house and across the road.
Looking down our street before it meets up with Lovell. Pretty bad, and almost impassable towards the intersection.Looking at our house (second house from the right) from the Oakridge/Hemlock fork. Our immediate neighbors have a lot of trees in their front yard and as a result got hit badly.
This was our most problematic damage, thank goodness. We had branches down in the back yard, but they aren't obstructing or breaking anything so it's not a huge deal. Some more came down after we took this picture.