'Bigfoot' Fights Permit Rules In High Court - New Hampshire News Story - WMUR New Hampshire

I don't know why I'm posting this other than the fact that it's just a really weird story.  
'Bigfoot' Fights Permit Rules In High Court - New Hampshire News Story - WMUR New Hampshire

Like Robinson Crusoe...as primative as can be.

Ah the joys of spending a week without power.  If you're my age or older the title of this post should have brought to mind the theme from Gilligan's Island.  That has been the state of my life for the past week or so.   If you’re a fellow New Englander, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  

 It started on Friday October 28^th.  I was aware we were supposed to get some snow, but twelve inches before Halloween is a rare thing.  I took it somewhat seriously, but not really.  I got home from work and did some basic preparation.  This includes bringing in a couple days worth of firewood into the garage, covering the fire-pit with a tarp and bringing in the tiki torches; so long autumn.

At 5 p.m. I discovered we had a leaking furnace.  I started the mop-up and had my “furnace guy” on the phone when the power went out.  The good news was that without electricity, the burner couldn’t fire and therefore the leak problem had solved itself, for now..  The bad news was…well…the power was out.  I was shocked that there was only about a quarter of an inch of snow on the ground at the moment the lights went out.  I thought this was New Hampshire, not Florida. 

We grilled, we ran the wood stove and skipped showers.  My little Coleman camp stove is a late-night life saver.  The kids ran around in the dark with their flashlights as they always do until somebody falls and cries.  At times like these I always hear my mom’s voice, “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt!” and I choose not to regurgitate that line from my childhood.  Instead I just dry the tears and ask, “What did you learn?”  My hope is that it will help the lesson sink-in instead of just being brushed aside.  It doesn’t seam to be working yet, but I’m hopeful.

The next morning revealed about 20 inches of snow, and trees snapped in half everyplace.  It wasn’t the light fluffy stuff either.  This stuff was wet and heavy.  It stuck to the autumn leaves and pulled the trees down with a vengeance.  We lost six trees in our yard alone.  One of them was across the driveway.  It was described by one reported as “absolute tree carnage.” 

My back yard looked like the frozen version of Narnia. If you look at the hand rail on the back deck you can almost get an idea of how much snow we got.

As the day passed (and my shoveling muscles inflamed) it became evident that the power-line situation was really bad.  Electricity wasn’t coming back any time soon and even the local cell towers were not functioning.  I’m also in a town that has no municipal water department and every house has a private water well.  Without electricity those water pumps don’t function.  This means no lights, no stove, no water, no toilets, no phones and no cell phones.  We’ve been through this before (minus the cell phone issue) but only for a couple of days. All the tree damage to the power lines was overwhelming. 

Another blow was dealt when the temperature climbed into the fifties the next day.  The content of my fridge usually survives these outages on my back deck while packed in snow, but not this time.  Over the course of the week we lost over $300 in frozen foods. 

On the second or third night my wife fell asleep in front of the wood stove with the door open and almost burned the house down.  –sigh.

I eventually started lugging in buckets of water from the farm down the road.  They had a generator and were kind enough to let us draw water from the hose in their horse corral.  This allowed us to flush the toilets, wash the out of control stack of dishes and de-funk our bodies.  The wood stove did a good job of heating the water as well as provide us with toast, bacon, eggs, soups, pasta and waffles.

On day five the lights came back on.  Normally this is when I stop to relax, but now I had a leaking furnace to deal with.  Turns out the expansion tank failed; in lay-terms that means $400 . 

I heard on the news today that parts of New Hampshire will not have power until the 11th.  Poor bastards!   I hope everyone’s week was better than mine! 

Wood, wood and more wood!

I think it was around April of this year that I set to work in the 3 acre wood behind my house to clear out all the dead wood.  Since we built the house we have had several good New England storms and the stuff really piled up.  The ice storm of '08, the wind storm of '10, and the hurricane (downgraded to a tropical storm) of '11 just to name a few.

I began the battle armed with my father in-law's tractor, a chainsaw, an axe, a splitting maul and a couple of cast-iron wedges.  I had the use of a log splitter for a couple weeks but that was not meant to last.  I felt like a pioneer from a hundred years ago as I chopped away at the mammoth piles of logs all summer.  I worked under the hot sun...just like my ancestors did.  I dragged logs and stacked everything by hand...just like my ancestors did.  I blasted Natasha Bedingfield from the stereo and drank imported rum...in honor of the horrific injuries my ancestors must have sustained doing this.  It's no wonder people died younger back then!

It was Tuesday October 18th at 6:15 pm in the afternoon that I stacked the very last piece of wood for the year.  I was soooooooooooooooooo happy to be able to lay that project to rest.

Final count was about 10 cords of wood.  That should last about three years in my wood stove depending on how sever or mild the winter is in New Hampshire is this year.

Part of my fire wood project that spanned about six months.  This was taken in early September:

Googl+

So I finally broke down and set up a Google+ account. plus.google.com/102149929136910230015

I only know about six people on there right now and they only check the thing once a week at most.  I'm not sure that I need two social media accounts, but we'll see what the future brings my way in the land of "+1's" and "circles."

The last month...

I'm happy to report that my little girl is doing fine.  Every once in a while she says, "I really miss Scout."  But she has dealt with her feelings and moved on. I'm so proud of her. 

We have have picked up two new kittens recently and they get along fine with our dog, Patch.  But our veteran cat of 8+ years is less than thrilled.  We decided to let my son name the gray one and let my daughter name the tiger one.  They chose the names "Gray" & "Tiger."  It looks like I'm going to have to enroll them in some sort of activity that promotes creative thinking.

Here they are stalking the dog...

Here is Tiger playing with the dog's tail...

Here's poor Patch passed out after entertaining the kittens all day...

In other news, I took second place in my humorous speech contest.  Not bad for my first time out of the gate.  I plan on spending the rest of this year working with a mentor to improve my writing and technique.  See if I can't do better next year.

Work, Speeches and Dying Ponies.

I haven’t blogged in a while.  No excuses; I just haven’t.  I do have a life you know!  A life that’s full.  Between being a scout leader, working, commuting and helping kids with homework I’m a little pressed for time.  My new endeavor is competitive public speaking.  In fact I’m entered to give my first speech tonight, at the club’s annual humorous speech competition.

The sad news is that my daughter’s pony passed away last weekend.  He coliced sometime during the night, my wife had the veterinarian there by 9:30 a.m. but it was too late.  He was a halflinger/Shetland cross and had an awesome temperament.  His name was Scout and he was a GREAT pony.  I was sad that the horse died, but seeing the tears run down my little girl’s face was almost more than I could stand.  I held her in my arms for hours while she sobbed.  It’s a tough lesson that all kids have to learn; I just wish she didn’t have to learn it so soon.  She’s only eight years old.  She spent Sunday night crying and didn’t fall asleep until 2:00 a.m.  Going to school the next day was obviously out of the question.  She’s doing better now and things are kind of back to normal.  I’m just wondering how she’s going to handle the empty stall in the barn when she goes out there this weekend. 

Hurricane Irene

The hurricane is gone and everything is drying out.  We’ve been without power since 10:00 am on Sunday morning and they’re saying one or two more days before it’s on (I’m writing this from work.) 

The preparations were simple:

1)      Fill the tub with water.  This allows us to have water for flushing toilets, washing dishes and eliminating bed-head.

2)      Take down the swings.  You don’t want any metal chains flying around in 60 mph winds.

3)      Flip the picnic table over (that’s where it’s going to end up anyway.)

4)      Take down all the little things like the flag, the hanging plants on the front porch, the hummingbird feeder and bring in the garden gnome.

5)      Do the dishes and laundry.  We have a private well and when the power goes out we have no water.  I hate starting a power outage while I’m already “in the red” so to speak.

6)      Candle and flashlight check.

7)      Get the Coleman stove ready to go.

8)  And of course, get some shelf-stable food and fill a few jugs of drinking water.

9)  Relax and watch the family panic.

It wasn't until late afternoon that I had to make the hardest decision of all: what foods to put in the cooler (on ice) and what foods to let go bad.  I just bought the strawberries and blueberries so those go in the cooler.  The milk is half gone and the jug is huge, let it die.  I did this until the cooler was full.  Goodbye Ah-So sauce.  I always say that losing power in the winter is better than losing it in the summer.  For starters, the windows are already shut and the house doesn’t turn into a stuffy oven when you close them all.  Second, the wood stove heats the house.  Third, I just throw all our food out onto the back deck and pack it in snow.  I’ve never lost any food during a blizzard.  These summer outages just suck!

The kids enjoyed watching the storm.  The trees whipping back and forth, rain coming down in sheets and branches falling from the sky.  My daughter didn't quite get the no electricity thing.  I told her she couldn't watch a DVD on the living room TV because the TV & DVD player won't work without electricity.  She said, "That's OK, I'll just watch it on the other TV."   OK, you go for it.  Let me know how that works out.

The poor dog suffered more than anyone though.  He came downstairs at one point dressed in a pink bathrobe and his head was covered in hair clips.  My daughter really shouldn’t be left alone with animals.  She killed a parrot when she was four.

After the storm was over my cat was very upset about all the branches in the yard and I think he wanted me to go out and pick them up right away.  He looked very stressed and spent an excessive amount of time seeking affection.  I think he needed a kitty Xanax, so I administered a healthy dose of catnip and he was off in another world for most of the afternoon.

By 8:30 pm the kids were tucked into the pull-out bed and my wife was right next to them on the couch.  I headed upstairs and crashed by 9:00.  The rain had stopped, the air was dry and the wind was still blowing at about 20 or 30 mph.  I opened all the windows and it felt like October.  I loved it!  I had the best nights sleep I've had in a very long time.

This morning I had the option to go to work or use a vacation day and stay home.  I believe another day in that house with my wife and kids would have put me in the nut house.  So here I sit eating microwave popcorn and surrounded by the glow of electricity.  Unfortunately I have to leave in a couple hours and return to my primitive shack full of restless natives.  Maybe I'll bring home a wild animal and we'll cook it over a fire in the back yard.