Power Outage

The first big snow storm of the season wasn't fooling around. After it dumped multiple inches of thick, wet, un-blowable snow, the wind began to howl, dropping tree limbs on roofs and power lines.

Around noon on Saturday, Adam climbed up on our garage roof to cut down a broken branch that threatened to sever the electrical line running from the garage to the house. Despite his efforts, the line was pulled from the box in our attic when the branch clipped the wire. Minutes later, our neighborhood lost power.

Capitalizing on the power outage, Adam quickly threaded the wire back under the siding and through the hole into the attic, where I re-secured the wires to the box. Then we waited...and waited...and waited for our electricity to return. By Sunday afternoon, we still didn't have power, and the new estimate from the automated Xcel Energy voice message was sometime Monday. Sunday afternoon we scooped our driveway while listening to the Vikings game broadcast from the Blazer radio, and then assisted a couple neighbors in the same task. Meanwhile, Collin and Aaron used the massive boulders from the snow plows to construct a snow fort.

Collin, Aaron, and I snuggled on the floor in front of the fireplace while Adam competed in the second match of USTA winter league. By Sunday night, temperatures in the remainder of the house had dipped into the 50's.
Our power finally returned...around 6:00 am on Monday morning. The whole thing brought into question the sanity of my homesteading relatives. After parking the covered wagon in the spring and completing assembly on the sod hut by fall, I'm fairly certain, had I actually managed to survive an entire winter, I would have abandoned aforementioned sod hut, re-packed the wagon and steered it south...to a warmer, more temperate climate.