If you’ve read my blog for any stretch of time, you know two things about me: I love Fall the most and February is always the worst month. I’m not going to say that how much February sucks is because of astrology… except I am. Mercury Retrograde almost always hits at some point in February, plus it is Pisces season.
This February was no exception to the rule: I got a lot done, but a lot of stuff went absolutely bonkers. Totally haywire. It’s so hard for me to even summarize February because… where do I begin?! I guess I should start with the Snow.
1. The Big Snow
It started snowing on February 24 at about noon. It did not stop for over 24 hours. By the end, we had about 14-16 inches at our house; at my parents’ house just a mile down the road from me (but slightly higher elevation), they had closer to 18-20 inches. In some drifts, there were nearly 2 feet of snow! The roads were a mess. And what was worse: the weight of the snow itself caused trees to fall, branches to snap, and power lines to be severed.
Our power went out around midnight between Sunday and Monday. Monday morning, I woke up with Forrest (he’d gotten into our bed because he couldn’t sleep alone in the dark) and went downstairs, got a fire going in our wood stove, and then opened the door to listen. It was only then that I realized how bad things were; it was still snowing and everything was extremely quiet… but I could hear breaking and crashing sounds in the woods all around us. And worse, the power line that goes over our yard kept shaking violently, including the power pole. I was suddenly not just annoyed that I didn’t have power, but pretty scared.
Once it got light out, I walked down our driveway to see what it looked like. We had about 4-5 trees down across our driveway and the snow was deep. There was no way we could get out. Throughout the rest of the morning, branches fell off the huge cedar tree right next to our house, crashing into our backyard, fence, and porch. Thankfully, nothing big hit our house—but it was scary.
My parents managed to clear their driveway, but it was nearly dark by then. They finally came over Tuesday to clear our driveway and we went to their house for a little while, as they have a generator. The next few days were basically the same pattern: we’d go to their house every day. The roads were bad. Here’s what they looked like in my area. That’s just one section; there were so many places where the road was reduced to nothing because trees had fallen inward on both sides, taking down power lines.
After 4 days, my parents got their power restored, but we didn’t. The line from our power pole to our neighbors house was still disconnected, which meant there was something wrong with the transformer on our pole. We waited and waited. It felt like an eternity! We went to my parents’ house every day to get some work done, shower, and charge our devices.
On the plus side, I got way more sleep that week than any other time in my life! I read a lot, did a lot of embroidery, and learned that I definitely need to be better prepared for emergencies. I have a blog post about emergency preparedness that I’m working on, so stay tuned for that.
Thankfully, our power was restored on March 3, but our internet satellite dish had been damaged. Having power was so nice though; I did so much laundry, cleaned everything, ran the dishwasher 3 times, and vacuumed up all the debris around our wood stove. It’s been a wild ride, but I am very done with snow and February.
2. Books I Read
Gosh, having no power makes you really get into reading. Here is every book I read during the outage:
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, by Richard Hell
Find Her, by Lisa Gardner
Cutting Season, by Attica Locke
Verity, by Colleen Hoover
Carnegie’s Maid, by Marie Benedict
The Hazel Wood, by Melissa Albert
Whew!
3. What Else?
For the sake of space, here’s a few little things that happened in February:
My work is moving offices. However, unfortunately, our new office was not ready before the end of our lease… so we are all working from home for the entire month of March and last week in February. As you can tell, that meant my work week was an absolutely wash because of the snow—and I wasn’t alone. Going back to work was honestly the most exciting thing in the world, but I didn’t didn’t have internet until last Friday!
We got our taxes done and despite paying in extra this past year… we still owed to Oregon and got a very small return from Federal. We’re trying to crack the code here and figure out how much we need to overpay to make even!
We planned our coast trip for this summer and fantasized multiple times about running away to Disneyland. (Once I could get my car out of my driveway, it was definitely hard to not just start driving to somewhere, anywhere else.)
I started learning embroidery. It’s been really fun and I’ve been loving the process! You can follow me on Instagram to see some of my projects.
Well, that’s about it for February. I’m excited for March; I’m really ready to be in Spring (even though it’s not my favorite time of the year), but I want to be far from the possibility of snow right now!
