Snowtober

Last Saturday we had a rare October snow.

Above was the scene out our front window, Saturday at 1:30pm, just as it started to snow.   Below is the view from our front door the next morning:

It probably only accumulated to six or ten inches where we were, but it was very heavy.  The fall colors and snow did combine to make for a nice aesthetic.  A couple of panels of our fence got taken down, but thankfully that was the only property damage we suffered.

When the big branch came down that blocked off half of the road in front of our house (in the picture two above), it took the top of the tree in front of it off with it (left, below).  The tree on the right, below, didn’t shed many branches but did look kind of cool with the snow and the orange leaves.  The bush below it is crushed by the weight of the snow.

I managed to get the car out but had to drive on the lawn a little to do it.  The town cleared the road and took away a decent chunk of that branch the next day.  Nancy managed to get rid of the rest of that branch with a post on craigslist (it was taken for use as firewood).

Our utility lines run right amongst the branches of the tree in our front yard, as you can see above.  That tree lost a lot of large branches (photos below) but somehow our lines were undamaged.

We just got our internet and cable back this evening, six days after the storm.  Our power came back in the middle of the night on Wednesday.  Mobile phone service was spotty for the first day or so, and 3G data was very slow until today, as over 150 of AT&T’s cell towers across the state were out.  As of right now, Friday night, 71% of our town is still without power.  Walking around today we saw that there are still dangling electrical lines all over the place.  We saw one utility pole that had been stripped bare of wires.  A lot of houses still have large branches on their roofs.  For some, it’s going to be a lot longer before things get back to normal—we were very lucky.