Just a little stir crazy

How fast a month flies by.  Especially when your kids have 9 snow days on top of winter break, and you are completely snowed in for 16-17 days in two separate winter storms.  The last one we were stuck at home for 8 days, and had a foot of snow.  I just didn’t have much leisurely time to sit down with my computer.

Here in Portland, we simply aren’t equipped as a city for a couple inches, much less the inundation that we received.  The city doesn’t salt the roads, as its an environmental issue.  We have not very many snow plows or trucks to distribute gravel.  State of emergency was declared.  Seattle sent snow plows down to us.  I think the downtown came back to life sooner, but we were still stuck until the weather changed and melted the snow.

4 giant evergreens fell across the road we use to access the outside world, which shut the road down.  Didn’t matter much to us, as we couldn’t get down off the hill to get to that road anyway.

My water barrel tower did finally arrive.  I only have 1/3 barrels for it.  The source I thought I had through my SiL didn’t pan out.  I guess they weren’t in any rush to help someone outside of their church.  So I just ordered a second one during a 60% off sale at Emergency Essentials.   I would have liked to order both that I need to fill the tower, but I have to watch my spending on such things.  Hubby isn’t on board, of course, and we just had all the Christmas expenses.

In better news, we weathered the snowed in days just fine.  I had plenty of food and we didn’t even have to dip into what I have stocked as real SHTF Emergency foods (grain, canned meats, etc).  The fridge was a bit of a barren wasteland by the time we could get out Thursday, and I ended up mostly emptying the chest freezer and need to re-stock meat, frozen fruits and veggies, and put another gallon or two of milk in there to rotate in case we get another bout of nasty weather.  I did a lot of baking to keep us in bread (ok, the cinnamon rolls, banana bread and apple and pear galettes weren’t strictly necessary for survival ;)) and went through several 5 pound bags of bread flour.

We never lost power or water here.  Areas very close to us did, and we did have an above ground outdoor spigot faucet thing up by my raised beds get damaged and start leaking, freezing into a spectacular crystal waterfall.  I was *almost* hoping we would, so I could try out my other preps, but in reality, its just as well.  I am about to pack away everything I had gotten out of the garage, just in case.  Lanterns, water coolers, the berkey, the Kelly kettle and my small stock of fuel for it (a box of twigs and pinecones, etc.)