Well ancona, be glad you're not growing oranges or something else where even a little freeze means no crop. Other than it's a pain to move anywhere - it's not anything like as bad as those negative F temps we had awhile back - now that
hurt!
This would be
fun if I could find my sled.
Good thoughts, Bug. I'm old skool - what doesn't kill ya makes you stronger, and it's nice to have the preps tested and known-good. Makes me feel more confident.
I jury rigged a roof over the generator using the other snow to hold up a plywood sheet, and it likes that great - now I know a new trick, and it was easy to re-fill with gas since it was clean and dry in there. It uses about 3 quarts/7 hours...I have 15 gal stored in an accessible shed, before I have to start thinking about syphoning gas out of vehicles to keep it going.
The snow cone idea was cool, I'll direct some of my neighbours to the site to look at it. After all, they have nothing else to do just now...
But it'd be more than I could eat - and some of them can't get their front doors open at all - even the types that have computer controlled propane whole house generators - they thought they were ready (and now they know better - one had to jump out of a window to get outdoors, then dig his way back to the front door to get back in).
But it's nearing 5 foot deep here (again, not that cold - and it's almost 12 feet deep where my solar panels have shed it) and now all you see is a cone sticking up out of nothing - the grill itself is no longer visible. Wow! I stomped out a tunnel to my infra-structure building so I still have plumbing etc, and of course, power for a day or two even if the generator fails right now (but I hope it won't - if it does, I have to clean off my Volt and hook it into the system as the backup-backup).
This is stuff that stops even a 4wd big tractor dead. A tracked loader - maybe, maybe not. I don't expect to see another human for about 3-5 days, and that'll be a guy on a huge CAT road grader - if we're lucky. If it's like it has been in the past, it'll be a week(+), and a front end loader loading a big truck to carry it away - you can't push to the side if there's no place to push it to. Takes awhile doing a road 10 feet at a time and waiting for the truck to return for the next 10 feet of progress.
The good news is - we out here can count on exceptional crops next year. Rain runs off and carries nutrients with it. Snow melts slow and carries fixed nitrogen (from 'pollution') into the ground with it. So, once again, when the rest of the farming world is whining about drought - we'll be getting rich. Always happy-making to have all your neighbours swimming in cash. If we're double-lucky, we'll have a nice late freeze and another almost insect-free year. Something you don't get in FLA.
Glass is solidly half-full. I bet people in say, Minnesota are laughing their butts off at the reactions from south of me where it's like the first time they've seen snow at all, and are clueless about how to handle it. Even in 5-6 foot deep snow I barely sink knee deep, after all. And I know how to drive in it, when that becomes possible (as in, is that big lump over there my truck?).
Staying safe and warm. No biggie, it's like when my parents would send me to my room, which was of course, where all my toys were anyway.:rotflmbo:
Today, I'm doing a wireless web server on
this, with their wireless "shield" plugged on top. Pretty cool you can even do this with 75 milliamps at 5v. Call it half a watt.
The title is "Because it's sometimes too much of a pain to go over there to flip a switch or measure the water system temperature". For some reason.