Tag Archives: storms

The calm before the storm?

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    As the day wears on, the chances of getting hit by not one, but two winter storms appears more likely. I can’t say I’m looking forward to them.

    While I enjoy being comfy and cozy inside while the wind is blowing and the snow is falling outside, I don’t like the aftermath of the storms. More snow means sidwalks to shovel, driveways to clear and roofs to rake. 

    But the storm will come (or not) no matter what my feelings are on the subject and my family and I will get prepared for it by making sure we have plenty of milk, bread and the fixings for some crock pot meals on hand.

   Given my tendency to eat during storms, I guess it’s a good thing that there will be physical work involved in digging out. Still, I wouldn’t mind if the storms veered off another direction and I could get my exercise by walking down snow-free country roads.

   For now, though,  I’ll try to enjoy today’s nice weather and not fret about what tomorrow might bring.

Piling on

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    Another weekend, another snowstorm. Although we didn’t get as much snow as predicted, plenty fell Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We shovel our sidewalk every day, so I’m not sure how much fell during those three days, but I do know that when I went to my mom’s house over the weekend (she lives a couple of miles down the road from us) to shovel her sidewalks there was a good 6 inches on them.  I had shoveled them a week or so ago so that amount had fallen fairly recently.

    The new snow, combined with what already fell, is piling up in our yard. I have to heave the snow pretty high when I’m shoveling the walk or it hits the sides of the canyon we’ve created and falls back onto the sidewalk. The snow in the fields is deep, too, and I noticed the other day there isn’t much of the the unharvested corn peeking out over the top of the snow in one of the fields near our house.

     It’s already shaping up to be a challenging spring. I just hope that the snowmelt is slow or there is going to be lots of water to deal with.

    

    

Here we go again?

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      Yikes! Just a few weeks after the storm that dumped 2 feet of snow on the Grand Forks area, it looks like we’re going to get socked again. While I don’t mind the thought of holing up in the house this weeknd, I’m not excited about dealing with the aftermath of wind, snow, ice…

      The ice actually makes me the most nervous. It’s no fun being on the farm without power. We do have a generator, but it can’t run everything in the house at once. We have to plug and unplug the cord into different outlets, depending on if we want to run the water pump, heat up the stove, etc.

        During the famous ice storm of ’97 we used the 1960s-era generator from Nodak that plugs into the power pole and runs off of a tractor PTO. At the time, we used my dad’s 4440 John Deere (diesel) tractor for the power. It ran constantly for seven days until the power finally was restored.

      The tractor has since been sold and I’m not sure if our 3010 gas-powered John Deere would have the endurance to run for that long, so we may have to rely on the small generator I mentioned earlier.

        Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. As long as we can pump water for the horses and ourselves and the house is realtively warm, we’ll be OK. We have plenty of food to last it out and it sounds like there will be enough shoveling involved with the storm to keep boredom at bay.