Cold as Ice

I'm trying to play blog catch-up from the last couple of weeks. A couple of weeks ago, we were hit with a series of serious winter storms. It all started on Monday night, with snow. I was thrilled to have a snow day on Tuesday, but when the freezing rain and sleet showed up Tuesday night, the novelty wore off. Wednesday morning by 9:30 the power was out, and it would stay off for the better part of the day.
The trees outside our townhouse were all under intense strain, with ice and snow coating every branch and weighing the limbs down. This is on the corner of my building, and is actually three separate trees. Surprisingly, today the trees seem no worse for the wear. I guess time shall tell if they bloom in the spring.

Wednesday afternoon, in a search for some sort of physical activity, I decided to go out and clear off the car. I had dug it out on Tuesday and backed in and out of my parking stall a couple times, but the snow created a whole other blanket to be scraped by Wednesday afternoon. Here I tried to show how thick the layer of ice was. It was at least a quarter inch, and covered everything.

On Tuesday night, right before the freezing rain started, my neighbor had gone down the row of parked cars and lifted all the windshield wipers off the windshield. It was an attempt to keep the blades undamaged, and I'm grateful for his thoughtfulness. Something that wouldn't have even occurred to me.

The only way to chip off ice this thick is to take the sharp corner of your ice scraper and puncture the layer. Once you crack it enough, a small chunk will usually fall off, and from there you have a starting point. It took me over an hour to scarp the crucial parts of my van.

The small vertical cracks you can see at the top of the picture are where I was hitting the sheet of ice. I was trying to de-ice the areas around each door, to ensure that I could actually get them open in case I needed to get somewhere in an emergency. At this point, our power was still out, and the temperature outside was hovering in the low twenties during the day. A lower temperature during the night was predicted, and I was trying to plan our escape to warmer climes if it became necessary.

This is the largest of the trees out our back door. This picture is NOT crooked, the tree is just weighed down that much. I actually was fearful that day that the whole line of trees was going to collapse directly into the back of our house.

Luckily, the closest we came were several broken limbs. These two pieces are actually the very tops of the two trees right outside my back door. The rest of the tree held up pretty well, but the very tops couldn't handle it, and snapped off about half the trees in the backyard. This type of damage is what caused our power to go out for most of the day on Wednesday.

The line of weighed down trees in our backyard. Jeremy kept wanting to play underneath the low branches, as they made a neat 'fort', but I was too afraid that a limb would fall off and hurt him. He was banished to the front yard whenever he played outside that day.

All in all, I'm glad that the ice has passed for the most part. In the parking lot, there is still a layer of ice about a foot thick. When I park my van, I have to be careful not to sit in the ruts made by the ice and snow, or I won't be able to get out the next day. Winter in Ohio is a much different affair than it is in Utah, that's for sure!