South end of South Carolina here. No snow, but cold cold cold! Better today, but yesterday we were at 11 deg at one point, and it never did get above freezing. I have water trickling in my outdoor faucets (I have a mini-farm) and wrapped the barn faucet in a heating pad and extra horse blanket. I did lose water briefly and surprisingly. I had run a load of dishes, and was cleaning and refilling the fish tanks when something in the pump house froze (I think). Still had the faucets open outside, so not really sure what happened.
I put a bigger heater in the pump house and ran down to my store (where I work), bought 2 water jugs and filled them there. Thankfully that Extra Effort And Expense charm worked because the water was moving again by the time I got home. I was really not looking forward to tea that tasted like plastic jug!
Temps are still going to be cold (for us) for a couple of days, but at least getting above freezing during the day. And Then 70 for NYE!
So weird …
Now to go out and try again to pick poop in the pasture. Tried earlier and it was too frozen to the ground!
I started leaving SE Michigan to go down to near Dayton to see family and had to turn around. Could tell it was to be a 6 to 7 hour knuckle buster drive, which is twice normal . So I pulled back and will await the better weather on Friday.
In Chicago it’s the third day of pretty damn cold (But warming up) with diminishing winds and not much snow at all.
Man, it looks like Buffalo got slammed! As in fire and ambulance not even able to respond to calls.
It’s up to “feels like” 4 degrees now so I’d say the worst is over. I’m very grateful we didn’t lose power. We’ve got some light, fluffy snow. Almost feels like Christmas.
I’m visiting my folks in Maine. We got through the wind and wet on friday, it was cold on saturday, but all was well until the power went out a 9 pm for no apparent reason.
One thing I do not miss about having dogs is the poopsicles.
Still cold here - overnight temps are predicted to be 13F, and about 20 minutes ago I got a text from the power company telling all us customers to please turn off any electric stuff that we don’t absolutely need to have on, since power usage was spiking and they didn’t want to have to do rolling outages again. So Christmas Day is officially over for this household and I’m going to bed.
I heard about twelve people dying in Buffalo after being stranded on the roadway, and it’s so tragic. But it sounds like for the most part, these deaths were totally avoidable. When the authorities tell you to stay off the roads… Stay off the roads. How awful would it feel knowing your loved one died trying to visit you?
Bus rollover in British Columbia; 4 dead, many injured. Police initial report is that the extremely icy conditions contributed to the rollover. No other vehicles involved.
They say that about every snowfall. They need to be careful about overstating warnings so that people will take them seriously. Snow is not a big deal in small quantities. Extreme cold, blinding snow storms, heavy winds, drifts that block roads, ice under snow…
This was a bad storm and people died because they didn’t take it seriously.
Thanks for the well-wishes. We stayed in all last evening, playing board games by candlelight and the fireplace.
Got wokened up at 3.30 am, when our house alarm went off when the power came back on.
Took 20 minutes to chip the ice off the car enough to drive to work, even with defrosters going full blast. Drove to work very slowly, but got there okay.
I was almost the idiot driving today. It warmed up to 38,with some sun, leaving the roads clean and mostly dry. or so I thought…
I wasn’t thinking the full reality rolling down the highway, and headed off on the interchange ramp like always. The ramp was a sharp curve, downhill, and most importantly in the shade. A solid layer of packed snow , probably only half an inch thick, but it was enough to make it immediately clear I should have been going 15 MPH less in those conditions. No actual harm, only an involuntarily lane change but only because that lane happened to be open.
Thanks for the update! Glad you had a nice warm safe evening.
@wolfman, glad you were lucky about the open lane. I’ve a couple of times in my life been very glad that the other lane was empty when I unexpectedly found myself in it – both of those a lesson for future driving.
