And a BIG Merry Christmas to all from the Sunny South! Just remember, any white stuff you have comes from the moisture we've sent (the color it becomes, after delivery, is your problem!)! No thanks expected or required (but we would appreciate your keeping your frigid air to yourselves)! Hope you all have a great New Year with good health and happy family times!
AHA...it's all your fault then!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toro...g-day-1.2476163A belated Merry Christmas to all! We were 49 hours without power (Saturday night to Monday night) and Christmas dinner for 14 at my house was beginning to look dicey. We have a gas stove (cooker, for those of you in the UK) so were able to use the burners, though not the oven, as that's electronic. We also have two gas fireplaces, which we were surprised to find DO work when you turn them on even with no power. Good thing too, as our neighbours who had no source of heat were reporting indoor temps hovering in the 40s (F) and we had -17 outside one night. Our house wasn't as warm as usual, but hey, I'll take 65-69 any day over barely more than freezing. I headed off to Canadian Tire on Sunday morning for batteries (AAAs for the LED flashlights we had were running low) and to see if I could find an LED camping lantern. Ha! EVERY camping lantern in the place was sold out - though I did manage to find their last 6 volt LED flashlight, some batteries and (in the automotive section) a 25-LED light with a hook and a magnet which proved very useful when we stuck it to a potlight in the kitchen. Still pretty dark though - wrapping presents was slow and comical. We were very lucky - none of our wires were pulled down and our big maple only lost some small limbs. Our birch tree is bent way over still, as the ice hasn't yet melted. Our entire neighbourhood, and any other neighbourhood in the city with mature trees was badly hit though. Limbs, entire trees and wires down everywhere - making many streets impassible. My neighbour across the street moved his car out of his driveway 5 minutes before an enormous limb crashed down where the car had been standing. We moved our cars up between the houses, a ploy that worked for us, but not for my aunt's next door neighbour who did the same thing only to have a huge branch bounce off her roof into the driveway between the houses, making her car a right-off. At the height of the outages, there were over 300,000 homes and businesses in Ontario without power - over a quarter million of those in Toronto. Now it's down to just over 50,000 and a lot of those are individual homes in areas where power has been restored to most, but not to those who had wires ripped off their houses. If there ever was a case for buried power lines, this is it!
Here are a few pics. I don't have as many as I would like, but it was a bit dangerous to be walking 'round when things were still crashing down! Since the software puts the last one I upload FIRST, the last one is of the intersection of our street and another street a few blocks away on Sunday, the third is of my neighbour's house - just after he moved the car on Sunday morning, the fourth is in our backyard. It's all quite beautiful with the sun on it now - (first shot).
