Iceathon 2010: The Storm

I've owed you this post for a few days now, but I've been running around enjoying hot water and lights that turn on at whim! Imagine!

The basic story is that last Thursday, our region of Oklahoma was the epicenter of an icestorm like this area has never seen before. We lost power almost immediately.

The views of the day made me feel like we'd landed on another planet.

This is not the rocky terrain of Pluto, it is our front lawn. Each blade was coated in an inch of ice. It made things really interesting for the dogs to try to do their doggie business.

 

The ice on the front of our house was so thick and heavy that our front walk is now littered with chips of stone that fell off as it melted. 

 

 

Those are some hardcore icicles. 

This is the new apple tree in the backyard. All of the trees were bowing low to the ground, and I spent the day running outside every  30 minutes or so trying to knock as much ice off of the tops of the trees as I could to keep them from snapping. I was not successful with the newest peach tree, which snapped with only 3 low-lying branches left on the trunk. 

My older peach tree, which I planted while pregnant in 2008, had me waging hand-to-hand war. 

As you can see in the pic, one branch on the right was already snapped and the branches on the left were dangerously close to breaking all day. I fought long and hard to save this tree. Everytime I started hacking at the ice, it was as if I was trying to free a flesh-and-blood friend. Something about the way I nursed this tree through it's first hot summer (all while swimming in ever-increasing pregnancy hormones) has me emotionally bonded to it forever. Happily, it did the best out of all of the trees.

After our first night in our literally freezing house, we spent a wonderfully warm day across the street with our neighbors at the One Acre Homestead, as I mentioned in the previous post. We trekked back and forth several times to stockpile our supplies. Here I am making a toilet paper run:

 

I'm planning a post about  how to prepare for such an event, having now lived through one, but in the meantime, here is some good advice. As I write this, many of my friends and family on the East Coast are snowed in with 2+feet of snow. While some are losing power, I'm fairly confident they won't have to go 7 days without it. Infrastructure for handling messy winter weather is something I sorely miss about the midatlantic region.