Chez Szondy digs out

We have been fighting the ravages of a winter storm since Monday and the results have not been pretty.  Casualties so far have been the Blazer, which was destroyed on Tuesday trying to get up the hill and may be scrapped.  I'm not certain of this because the machine was towed into town and I haven't had a chance to look at it.  The mechanic said that it's a dead loss, but so did the last one who looked at it two years ago.   The other is the PT Cruiser, which we believe cracked a fuel line when we tried to start it this morning.  Another tow job and one that means some fearful logistical problems if we're wrong.

The other part of the week has been marked by heavy snows and freezing temperatures.  It's bad enough that the roads have been impassable.  I've already ended up trudging a couple of miles up our road over the past few days.  It's also covered tree branches with thick snow, which has caused all manner of havoc with roads made even more impassable, outbuildings collapsing under blankets of snow and frequent power outages.  Worse, when the power was on the clouds were so thick with ice that the satellite signal might as well have been hitting a brick wall.

The upshot: I awoke this morning to a a land of wet, melting snow feeding what is certain to be flooding down in the valley, no power, no heat save in the living room, the prospect of boiling a kettle on the emergency camp stove, a child who has been housebound for the better part of a week, a wife who has been kept from work during her busiest time of the year and is close to despair, two dogs who are having nervous breakdowns because of all the outages and yours truly missing every deadline imaginable.

Since I'm writing this, the power has obviously come back on and I'm overheating every room in the house just in case it blips out, I'm waiting for the two truck to haul the Cruiser into town and wife and daughter have bags packed just in case the car can't be repaired today and they have to evacuate to Grandma and Grandpa's house while I stay home to take care of the dogs and keep the pipes from freezing.

Needless to say, this is a long way of telling everyone that blogging will be light over the next few days while I sort things out this end.

No wonder I'm getting these headaches.