Yesterday was the third anniversary of my wife Dymphna’s death, and the future Baron came to visit for the occasion. I didn’t expect our activities to interfere with my normal workday, and they didn’t. Instead, Murphy intervened again and shut me down for about eighteen hours.

In the middle of the afternoon, while the fB and I were cutting flowers to take down to the grave, the wind freshened and an ominous rumbling could be heard in the west as the sky darkened. By the time we got into the car the rain was already spattering down. As we drove to the churchyard, the full violence of the storm hit, with heavy rain and gusts of wind ripping branches off the trees and throwing them into the road. We sat in the car in the parking area by the cemetery and waited to see if the rain would abate. It didn’t last very long, and when it was down to a sprinkle we got out and put the flowers in the big mason jar that I keep by Dymphna’s headstone for that purpose. We said a brief prayer and then left, intending to go out for an early dinner.

I noticed that the electricity was out in the little country store near the church, so I diverted to go back home and power down the computers (which are on separate UPS systems) in an orderly fashion. However, back at Schloss Bodissey the electricity was still on. We returned to our original plan and went out for dinner. Non-halal Indian food — curried goat for the fB, lamb bhuna for me, very tasty.

By the time we returned home the weather had cleared completely, and it was cool and pleasant as dozens of fireflies rose from the wet grass all over the yard. The electricity had never gone out, but even modest storms strain the phone company’s decrepit systems, and the Internet was down. It stayed down for the rest of the evening, so the future Baron and I entertained ourselves by watching Firefly episodes on DVD while drinking a bottle of wine. I also prepared several posts to put up when the Internet came back on, but it stayed down until I went to bed. When I woke up this morning it was back on.

That’s why there was no news feed last night. I’ll collect all the items that were sent in and include them a large news feed tonight. And I’ll be putting up those other posts in due course.

The last of the wintry mix faded out here at Schloss Bodissey a couple of hours ago. The rain changed to sleet early on, and it looks like there may be four or five inches (~12cm) of sleet on top of the snow. There’s no significant coating of ice on the trees, which is why I have electricity and the Internet to put up this post.

I’m not entirely out of the woods yet, so to speak, because sometimes trees uproot themselves and fall down the next day after the ground has thawed a little. But I’m tentatively optimistic.

Tomorrow I’ll go out to clean off the car and shovel sleet, which is like scooping up lead pellets — it’s backbreaking work. Then I’ll hie me down the driveway and see what the pine trees have been up to.

It’s still possible that the power may go out, so if this site appears to go dormant, you’ll know that’s the reason. Unless, of course, the tsunami from the second Tonga eruption somehow finds its way all the way up here into the Piedmont…

Update #2 3:15pm EST: The snow has changed to rain, which is ominous, because it’s still so cold. The wind is blowing harder now, but not alarmingly so. I’ve filled the bathtub and all the big pans with water. All I can do now is wait and see what happens.

If this is all the snow we’re going to get (about 4″ = 10 cm), I may not have any trouble getting out of here, depending on where the trees fall down.

Update 1:20pm EST: Snow is coming down hard now, but there isn’t much on the ground yet, maybe two inches or so. The temperature is below freezing. There is only a light breeze, and no freezing rain so far. All is well for now.

Another blizzard is scheduled for Central Virginia later today. After what happened last time, I decided to get my post up well ahead of time, so that readers will know what’s up if the lights go dark again.

According to the forecast we can expect 7″ (18cm) of snow. It won’t be wet snow this time — the temperature is predicted to remain at or below freezing while the climate change is coming down. However, as of the last time I checked the timeline chart, there is an ominous period late in the day when the snow changes to rain. If it weren’t for that, I would be fairly confident that the lights will remain on. But with freezing rain in the mix, who can tell?

I’d like to think that all the pine trees that were going to fall came down two weeks ago, and that they’re aren’t any left. However, I’ve learned from decades of hard experience that there’s always another pine tree. I never noticed that tree before, and now it’s horizontal, blocking the driveway…

I expect to wake up later this morning to find the ground covered in white, and be able to cook my breakfast, get online, and otherwise engage in normal activities, at least for a while. But we’ll see.

I’ve had my share of winter now, and then some.

Up until Monday the weather had been quite mild, and almost spring-like in the past week or ten days. There hadn’t been a flake of snow. On Sunday it was 70°F (21°C) here at Schloss Bodissey.

All that changed late Sunday night and early Monday morning. The temperature had dropped steadily during the night, and the rain changed to snow. When I got up at 8:00 in the morning, there were near-blizzard conditions outside the window. The snow looked like it was wet, and the wind was whipping the pine trees back and forth. The lights flickered a couple of times, then came back on.

After I ate breakfast, I turned the computer on and was about to post a message about a possible outage. Unfortunately, as soon as the machine booted up the lights went off again, and stayed off. The computer is on a UPS, which gave me enough time to close everything and shut it down properly.

And it kept snowing hard. In the afternoon, when it finally quit, I went outside and measured it: 10.5 inches (27cm). So I was snowed in, and without power.

Two modest-sized trees had fallen in the yard. I could see one small tree (a dogwood, as I discovered later) canted over across the driveway a little ways down. Not too bad — I could deal with that one. It wasn’t until the next day (Tuesday), when I walked down the driveway, that I discovered that the way was completely blocked by fallen pine trees, some of them quite large. I don’t have a chainsaw, so I was stuck here until I could round up some help.

The phone was still working on Monday evening. I called one of my stepsons in Richmond to let him know the situation. The next morning, when I picked up the phone, the line was completely dead. So I was without electricity, without a phone, and had no way to get out.

I walked down the driveway — detouring through the woods at one point to avoid a deadfall of little pine trees — to the main road to talk to one of my neighbors. Her electricity and phone were out, too. The poor woman lives in a double-wide with no non-electric heat. Fortunately, she has kin just down the road, and said she could stay with them if it got too bad. I was relieved to hear that, since she’s in her eighties, and there was no way I could have got her back through the woods to get warm in my house.

I was somewhat better off here, because I have Dymphna’s gas cooking stove. She bought it more than ten years ago after we went through several ordeals like this one, and she made sure to get one with no electronics — it doesn’t even have an electric connection. When the power goes out, it works just fine.

I devised a system where I kept three large cooking pots filled with melting snow on the range, set on low heat. That provided nice radiant heat in the kitchen. I was able to keep the room at 64°F (18°C) during the day, but it went down to 57° (14°C) at night. In the bedroom it was somewhat colder — about 56° during the day and maybe 52° (11°C) at night. I put the heavy comforter on the bed. It was chilly, but not unbearable.

I was able to fix myself hot meals, and had tea to drink. I spent a lot of my time during the daylight hours collecting snow in different pans to replenish the supply in the pots on the stove. When dusk came I lit four or five candles in different places, and used a little flashlight to get around.

So that’s how I dealt with situation until today. It was an ordeal, but bearable. The hardest part was the long night — about fourteen hours without meaningful daylight. The condition of my eyes renders me unable to read by flashlight or candlelight, so there was nothing for me to do except tend the heater pans on the stove. It was intensely boring. I slept a lot, but there are only so many hours you can sleep. I spent long hours lying awake in the bed under that comforter.

Just after midnight this morning I was awakened by a banging on the front door. It was my stepson, who had driven all the way from Richmond to check on me — he was worried because he’d been trying to call me, and got no answer. He drove down the driveway as far as he could get, then followed my footprints through the woods around the deadfall, and walked all the way down here. I was totally surprised and gratified that he was looking out for me. But there was nothing he could do to help — if I were to go back with him to Richmond to stay at his house, I would have had to turn off the heater pans, and the water pipes under the house would have frozen. So I had to stay here. He walked back to his car and drove all the way back to Richmond.

This morning I woke up to more of the same. I’d heard from my neighbor that the power company was estimating that our electricity would be restored by Friday — which might have been over-optimistic. I braced myself for a long siege.

At noon I walked down the road about a half a mile to consult with another one of my neighbors, who has a chainsaw and a tractor. He agreed to help me. We worked together clearing out the fallen trees. The chainsaw was indispensable, but the tractor did most of the work. He’d make just enough cuts so that he could move the debris out of the way with the bucket on the front of the tractor. The deadfall was the worst part — it was in a narrow, tight, heavily wooded section, and took a long time to clear.

But it got done — I am officially able to get out, and will do so tomorrow.

When I got back to the house I was amazed to see the lights in the living room back on — the power had come back on a couple of hours previously. The house was already starting to warm up. What a relief!

And the phone was back on, too. My theory is that a major switching box shut down after having its electricity supply cut off for so long. With the phone came the Internet, so here I am, able to tell my story about the Great Blizzard of ’22.

Being out of action for so long has left me a real backlog. I haven’t even looked at my email yet — I dread to think how much of it there will be. And I have a lot to do here in the house to clear up the filth and detritus of three days without power. I’m running a load in the dishwasher right now. And some of the meat in the freezer has gone soft enough that I’ll have to deal with it. I have a package of pork chops out — they’re the most sensitive, so I’ll cook them tonight.

I’ll keep approving comments, and do my best to put out a news feed before midnight. Bear with me; I should be back on an even keel within a couple of days.

My phone and Internet service just came back on after being out for more than 24 hours.

Yesterday afternoon there was a moderate thunderstorm in the area. A little bit of thunder, a modest amount of rain. When the rumbling started, I thought about putting up a bad weather post, but then said to myself, “Nah — this is hardly anything. Why bother?”

Well. What better way to invoke Murphy’s Law?

After the storm was over, and the rumbling had mostly stopped, the phone and Internet abruptly went out. The phone line was completely dead. Most of the time when that happens, service spontaneously comes back in a few hours. So I decided to wait it out. No luck — bedtime came, and the line was still dead.

When I got up this morning it was still out. Very annoying! I waited for it to come on; if it didn’t, after work hours I was going to drive to see one or more friends and ask to use their phone to call the phone company. There’s no cell coverage here at Schloss Bodissey, but there is some a few miles down the road, so I’d be able to get help even if the landline outage was widespread (but if it was widespread, of course, I wouldn’t need to call the company — I could be certain they were already working it).

Ten minutes before I planned to put my shoes on and go, the phone company, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it was time to restore my service.

I’ll be a while catching up. I have a lot of material backed up, but I spent yesterday evening formatting it for posting, so I should be able to put it up tonight. And I have a gazillion emails to go through, so be patient.