Federal Disaster Area

What a month this has been! We had one of the worst ice storms of the last century! Lots of damage and destruction - tens of thousands without power for many days (some still out now).
We were without power for only a part of the first day - one of the blessings of underground utilities - and ended up housing several others for a time. The last two just moved back home today, in fact.

More Ice Storm Pictures

More ice storm pictures. I don't know what the official total was, but our branches had at least an extra 3/4 inch all the way around. The grass would shatter when you walked through the clumps; not from cold, but from the added weight of the ice itself. When the tree limbs were falling (most of two nights!) you would hear a loud pop, then a shattering noise of the ice breaking off the limbs when it all hit the ground. The weirdest part was that the roads never accumulated the ice - just everything else. No school for the whole week, panic buying all over the city, generators going like hotcakes (some people made big bucks there), and transformers popping like fireworks. Some of our kids watching one night actually thought there were fireworks going off.

Girls' Winter Concerts

Here are the two budding musicians at their 6th and 7th grade concerts at Carver Middle School. They are really getting to be quite good!