Snow Days ...

... they're not all they're cracked up to be.

Coming from So. California, where there is no such thing as a "snow day," it's always interesting to experience one here in Kentucky. And the last 24 hours have been especially interesting.

We received a few inches of snow early Tuesday morning so I (Seth) got to stay home from work. By the end of the day, it was no longer snow that was falling but freezing rain ... on top of the few inches of snow. A recipe for disaster.

Sure enough, the power went out last night around 9pm, which means that the furnace didn't work either. For the rest of the evening we had the delightful experience of lighting candles, bundling up, and listening to transformers blow and tree limbs snap all over the neighborhood. (The freezing rain had covered the trees in a coat of ice and the weight of the ice was snapping large branches off.) With several trees located next to our house and an occasional flash of light from a transformer exploding, it was about as relaxing as sleeping in a WWII foxhole.

Around 4:30am, the kids woke up because they were cold. (They had crawled out from under the blankets we had heaped over them.) So I covered up Benj again and took Talia back to sleep in our bed. Five minutes later, one of the large branches over our house crashed on top of the roof and scared us all half to death. After I checked to make sure we were all okay, I trudged outside and walked around the house. Fortunately the branch didn’t seem to have caused any damage to the house, but another tree was leaning threateningly towards the end of the house where the bedrooms are. So I got the blow-up mattress out of the shed and we all camped out in the living room.

Needless to say we couldn’t stay there another night and with thousands and thousands of people without power (a newspaper article today stated that over 500,000 homes and businesses in the region are out), we figured it will probably be days before it is back up. It was so cold in the house this morning that at one point I could see Kiersten's breath while we were sitting at the kitchen table! We don’t even have a fireplace to heat the house the old fashioned way. So in the end we decided to go down to Nashville to stay with my sister.

It only took me 4 hours to get my car out of our driveway (a long driveway that slopes up to the street). The car was covered with about 5 or 6 inches of snow and ice. It was basically a large ice cube. Once the car was thawed out, I then had to deal with the driveway. After several failed attempts of simply driving on top of the snow, I eventually had to shovel the whole driveway. But once we got on the road it was pretty smooth sailing, even though it was an eerie drive with downed branches and even whole trees on either side of the freeway.

We're all now safe and warm in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But who knows when we will be able to get back home?

Maybe the school will give me an extension on the dissertation deadline. Now that would be a nice "snow day."

(We'll post pictures sometime in the near future.)