We got our asses kicked, plain and simple. I’ve lived through three significant hurricanes and any number of powerful nor’easters along with not one but two absolutely devastating ice storms, and the winter storm 2 weeks ago was right up there in terms of its impact on the region I lived in and on me personally.

The root problem was that we had significant wet snowfall before most of the trees had lost their leaves. This caused unbelievable tree damage. It was unlike what typically happens in nor’easters and hurricanes, where you get many trees coming down. Instead, seemingly every single tree lost one or more limbs, but few trees came completely down. It destroyed the electrical grid and blocked roads everywhere. There are two major routes from my house to my employer (Route 9 and Bay Road) and both were down to a single lane in multiple locations, with Bay Road completely blocked in one section that caused the town to route traffic through some poor person’s front yard. On both routes, the power lines were laying on the road in multiple locations, there were a number of places where huge limbs were suspended in the air on power lines, and a roughly equal number of places where telephone poles snapped under the weight of the tree limbs laying on their lines. On my own property we have around a dozen apple trees, and every single one of them was ‘capped’ (losing its topmost section) along with most of them losing at least a portion of their other major limbs. At least 3 of them are going to die from this, and several others are on the bubble as far as I can tell. Our maples and oaks also got whacked, including my favorite maple, which was an absolutely beautiful tree that is stunning in the fall. Now it looks like pacman took a bite out of it – it lost 2 of 4 of its major limbs. We also almost lost our barn. A nut tree in the back dropped a limb at least 12″ thick onto the roof, and the barn was only saved because the force of the fall was largely taken by an adjacent tree’s major limb. That tree’s probably a goner now.

The majority of the region didn’t have power for days. Amherst College was closed due to power loss, something we think has never happened before. Our students had to bunk up with friends or sleep in the gym because several dorms had no power for a couple of days. Our daycare provider, along with a couple of other college buildings, had no power all week. My house had no power for a week, as did >90% of the town I live in. This was tough. We’re on well water and no power means no water.  The only thing that left us able to inhabit our house was the propane stove in the basement, where we lived, and the propane cooking stove we used to melt snow for water. I have a solar charger and a number of battery packs that we used to keep our phones and the ipad functioning. Susan and I alternated days off from work, with one of us working and one staying home with Brady. We lost hundreds of dollars in food (over a 100 in condiments alone!) because we couldn’t keep things refrigerated. Thankfully we had not yet finished filling our new chest freezer. Much of Brady’s home cooked baby food was lost. I bathed out of a basin using boiled snow water and felt like I had reverted to a lifestyle a century old. We fell asleep by 8:30 or 9. It was hard work and took its toll on us, with Susan and I bickering and occasionally sniping at each other from the stress by the end of the week.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of adventure and new experiences. This one was harder than most, but I suspect as time passes the negative aspects will fade and we’ll talk with pride of how we ‘roughed it’ for a week. Brady came through it like a champ despite having a cold. I think he loved the sleepover with Mom and Dad in the basement – most morning’s he’d wake before us and be happy as a clam to discover us right there next to him.

I wouldn’t say we’re recovered yet – our fridge looks barren despite spending $300 to restock it this weekend. Our yard looks like the set of a disaster film, with tree work in various stages of completion based on how dire things look, and based on the pace, months to go now that it’s dark when I get home from work. The worst limb is off the barn but there’s a tangle adjacent to it that threatens a dramatic collapse if we don’t deal with it (though we think/hope we’ve got it in a state where the barn is not threatened).

Still, by and large life has returned to its regular rhythms, and all things considered we came through this pretty cleanly, as did our friends in the region. A memory for life, in the final analysis, but not a life changer, is what this will amount to in the end, and I’m good with that

Brady’s daycare provider called mid-day this week and asked us to pick him up because he was sick. I was stuck in meetings for a few hours so Susan took him at first, but she had afternoon meetings so at 3 I picked him up at her office and headed home with him.

There were two immediate problems. The first was that we often park the car at his daycare provider and walk since it’s about 1/2 mile or so to work and is a good opportunity for some exercise most days. The second is that I also had Soolin. This meant I had to walk a half mile with the boy while wrangling to dog and carrying my briefcase and  Brady’s diaper bag. Brady’s been getting heavier and it’s not easy carrying him that far anymore – when Susan and I do it we trade off now as we each tire, or I put him on my shoulders, which I couldn’t do with the dog and the bags. Still, it wasn’t impossible, plus the good news was, he hadn’t been throwing up since Susan picked him up.

Things went more or less ok for half the walk. Soolin did her occasional ‘Squirrel!! Pull, pounce!’ action (the campus is overrun with squirrels) but I’m used to it. What I wasn’t used to was managing his weight for this long, and I soon began to tire. Plus both bags were constantly slipping off my shoulders. I felt like I was doing a slow motion juggle. The problems really started though when Soolin decided she had to poop. We’re responsible dog owners and always pick up after her, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with Brady while I cleaned up. I finally settled on plopping him down on the sidewalk while taking care of Soolin’s business. Several things, none good, suddenly happened at once. Brady set off towards Soolins poop as soon as I put him down. Soolin saw a cat or squirrel and decided to bolt. I saw happening in slow motion, paralyzed. I settled on grabbing Brady, and watched in horror as Soolin’s lead dragged through her poop, completely fouling it.

aigh! Picture me now very angry, trying hard not to show it to Brady, while attempting to get Soolin under verbal control. She’s usually a well behaved dog, but she was irrepressible – every time I got her in a down, as soon as I turned away, up she would pop, dragging her foul lead around. She took a fair bit of verbal abuse from me while I finished cleaning up her mess. I then took a dog poop bag and wore it as a glove, grabbed her lead with this, and tried to continue on to the car. Of course Brady spied the bag as glove and went all ‘ooh, what do you have there Dad, I really want that!!!’, wriggling and bouncing and exclaiming and complaining as I wriggled myself to keep it from his grasp, all while still trying to keep the two bags (briefcase and diaper) from sliding off my shoulder into the poop lead, and trying to keep Soolin from pulling towards whatever it was she had spotted.

Thus went the rest of my walk to the car. It *sucked*. The only good news is that Brady never managed to grab anything, and amazingly I managed to keep the pooplead from touching anything.

(except for Susan. Later that night when she came home, she came in holding the poop lead, and asked ‘why was this hanging outside?’ She wasn’t too pleased that I hadn’t warned her).

We had friends over one day this weekend and experimented with cider pressing after Susan’s Dad gave us a press and grinder he had. Overall it went great, though it was a pretty full day of work. We started in the morning collecting apples from our property. We have around 15 trees on our land and there are 3 or  4 on the adjacent property that’s been left to run wild. Most of them are doing really well this year including several which have had a blockbuster year. We took our tractor and cart and our guests, which included Andy and his two daughters River and Sage, and Bill and Daniel and their two daughters Jacqui and Gabbie, plus Amy and Sussane and Kieth and their two kids Sophie and Henry, and drove from tree to tree picking up the most promising looking apples, occasionally climbing up into the trees to shake them to get the most healthy fruit up near the top. By the time we had a mostly full cart we had gotten tired and broke for lunch. After lunch we setup – things started with sorting and washing, with the apples that needed attention passed to the carving table to have questionable bits cut off. Everything ended up in the washing bin, after which it got tossed into the grinder bin. The grinder is an old washing machine motor hooked to a large diameter wooden dowel that’s got dozens of stainless steel screws sticking up out of it. You press the apples down over this to produce the mash, which then gets dumping into a press lined with a burlap sack. Once the juice has been pressed out of the mash you pour it through cheesecloth to filter out the last of the bits and viola, you have cider. Ours was delicious and well worth the effort. All told we got about 7 gallons out of a cart full of apples, enough for us to share generously with all the helpers and still have enough left over to freeze for Brady as popsicles. Assuming we have years like this again, we could easily get 10x as much cider just by attending to the drops from the trees, and there’s still enough for us to do this at least one more time this year – anyone wanting to come by to participate let us know, we’re figuring on doing it again this weekend. Below is a picture of half the setup, and there are a few more pictures here in our gallery.

Cider pressing 2011

You always hear about how when you buy a house you need a ton of cash on hand to take care of all the unexpected expenses. Susan and I had planned ahead, but nonetheless we ended up more than 10k in the hole after the sale, mostly via the purchase of a spendy yard tractor and $6k+ in new appliances. Both were mostly necessary expenses. We definitely could have gotten by with cheaper appliances, but we figured ehh, we’re likely only going to do this once so we might as well splurge, so we bought top of the line appliances. On the tractor end of things, we could have spent at least $1500 less, but I was adamant that we should get something good and mobile. Good because all you read about is how the medium to low end ride on mowers wear out after 3-5 seasons, and we have 3 acres to mow. Mobile because the property has a lot of trees on it. I’m convinced I save an hour a week with our 4 wheel steering model.

We were smart about things – we don’t normally carry debt outside of car loans and mortgage. We research purchases using consumer reports and my endless googling. We talked through everything in the months leading up to the move. In the end though, we lucked out in terms of timing and got 0% financing from Sears on the appliances, along with a bunch of savings tied to a state program that was in play during the week we purchased, and similarly got a 0% finance plus accoutrements deal on the tractor. The downside to the finance deal was, we had a year to pay it all off. We just finished.

So that’s the good news, right? This should mean tons of free capital in the family budget. A Big screen tv, a new ipad 2, and a replacement for my blown up xbox 360, all on the menu this summer? It’s a no brainer! Err, except for two nefariously expensive words which I’ll close with:

Infant daycare  ;-(

Had a moment of real parental anxiety yesterday. We had a wave of powerful supercell thunderstorms blow through yesterday afternoon right as I was supposed to leave work. Amherst’s town alert system went off and our campus police told everyone to take shelter. I ended up with a bunch of my coworkers in the basement of my building. My house is about 15 minutes away to the SE of our campus. The storms hitting us then would reach my house in 10-15 minutes, and I sat there wondering whether I should rush home trying to outrun the storms in order to be home with my infant son, or to stick it out and hope for the best. I was really conflicted. Brady was home with my mother in law, and given my druthers I’d rather have been there, but I ended up concluding sticking tight was the safest thing. I wouldn’t have been much help to him if I’d gotten stuck or worse on my way home.

In the end everything worked out fine. My mother in law took him down into the basement and they waited things out. Later that night we had to grab him out of bed and head down into the basement again when another line of supercells passed through, but no tornadoes touched down either at home or work. We do have friends whose neighborhoods and possibly houses have been damaged though, so today I’ve got my fingers crossed for them. All told 7 tornadoes touched down in our region, and so far 4 people are reported dead. Scary stuff when it hits this close to home.