There's a story (apparently) about an ant and a grasshopper - how the ant spent all his time busy getting ready for winter while the grasshopper played the summer away. 

Evidently we are the pathetic grasshoppers. Everyone in the valley has their woodstoves running and we have no firewood at all. In our defence, we don't have a chainsaw either, but were supposed to get one, so it's not a great excuse. And we have plenty of dead trees just waiting to be cut down.

Sunday, Jess was going to come over and cut down one of the dead oaks in the horse paddock which we would then miraculously turn into firewood. But it was such a grungy day, spitting icy snowlets, that we cancelled the whole plan - instead going over to their house in the evening to eat pizza and filch some of their ready-made firewood.

By the time we left that evening, it was snowing and about half an inch had fallen and was sticking slightly.

We've lived up on the Georgetown Divide for 9 years now and woke up to more snow than we've ever had - about 2' fell overnight. 

At around 3 am, the power went off. 
It didn't come back on until 3:30 pm on Thursday :(  

Needless to say, we made very good use of Ann and Jess's firewood supply - they even brought some more over on Wednesday. Thanks guys! You saved us!.

Before

After

Don't think we're going 
to work today...

We actually stayed home Monday and Tuesday, doing our best to keep the house warm with the wood stove to stop the tropical fish from freezing (after the last time we lost power for several days and lost the whole tank, we moved them into the living room where the wood stove is and managed to keep them at 60°F). 

On Tuesday the freezer in the kitchen began to defrost since we were keeping that end of the house above 60°, so we removed the contents, put it into an ice chest and left it on the front deck.

Luckily, our big freezer is in the mud-room which is the coldest room in the house. We never opened it and its contents survived the four power-less days..

Front and back steps

Luckily, the horses have big 50 gallon troughs in their paddocks. Unluckily 50 gallons doesn't go very far, especially when much of it freezes overnight (the temperatures were dropping into the low 20s each night), so we also spent a good deal of time visiting our neighbours (who have a generator) and filling our 7-gallon containers and then rationing it out to the pones. Sadly, three 7-gallon containers don't go far between six horses, so we bought two more on our way home from work on Wednesday - this meant we were able to hold back a couple of gallons with which to shower, using my propane camp shower.

On Wednesday evening when I came home from spending four hours at work, I rescued six of the eight goldfish from the frozen dregs of the troughs. One had died of freezer burn and the eighth was buried under the snow and ice

Looking down the driveway

Two more cars we won't be using

Even if we'd had power, 
our internet satellite dish wasn't 
going to be much use...