It Was Sposed To Melt!

What a week we've had!! East Tennessee weather drives the meteorologists mad! We live right on the edge. It could go snow, it could go ice! I've lived here since 1980 and we've loved it. Other than a few blips in weather, it's been fine. Sure, there's been tornado or wind sheer episodes, the blizzard of 1993 and then the one in 1994 were epic but for the most part, we've managed to avoid most of the stuff that'd keep us home!

The past week has been the exception. 

I think I took these pictures on Tuesday. It doesn't look like much does it? Until you realize that it's not really snow, it's ice, that is!!

It started as rain, turned to freezing rain, ice pelts and then snow on top of it. The ice is probably an inch or so thick and the weather's been cold enough for it to stay that way.

My poor azaleas, the ones that bloom in spring with the biggest white flowers you'll ever see, were almost flat on the ground, weighed down by all that ice.

 This is some kind of vine that we probably shouldn't have allowed to get this big but it was pretty. Well, it's supposed to be straight up in the air, not hanging by a couple of anchor roots or whatever. DH's car was behind this so it was fun to drive out from underneath it. He did cut it off somewhat this weekend.

 Normally, esp back in 93 and 94 and then when we have wind sheer events, we lost our power. We've lost it for up to 5 days up here. However, other than a bunch of flickers last Monday night and the fact that we lost our cable for 36 hours, we've been fine! It's been amazing, almost like it didn't affect me at all except that I stayed home. I can't complain except that I will. My brake replacement part hasn't arrived yet so I haven't been able to weave on that warp.
The other thing about this past week has been some of the nighttime lows. We were close to 0 degrees and many pipes have frozen. We had water running all night but apparently in the kitchen we only had the cold running because the hot water pipe froze. That kind of scared us!! We opened the door under the sink and put a fan there blowing warm air against that wall. After a couple of hours, hot water started coming out of the tap again. What a relief!! We'll remember to open the door under the sink next time it's so cold and be sure there's warm water coming out of the tap as well all night!! So many people had it much tougher, no power or water. The guys that work for the power companies have been awesome, working 18 hour days to get people back online!! Losing cable for a night or two is nothing compared to trying to keep warm when it gets so cold.
Saturday we woke to snow again. It wasn't really bad and we were able to inch down the driveway to attend a funeral. Other than our subdivision, the roads were fine. I think all the subdivisions are like ours, covered in snow and ice inspite of them having treated most of the main ones. How fortunate we were though. We got a bit of ice as well but nothing like about 60 miles to the west of us where they got a major ice storm and many thousands are without power again on Saturday.

This morning our driveway looks like this. It's beginning to melt in the ruts but the temperature high for today is 34 degrees.....wonder what tomorrow will bring. 40% chance of snow overnight....and this part of the driveway is actually alot better than the other end which is a fairly steep downhill ride with a steep dropoff on the side and if we went too far, over a cliff! See why we inch down? I'm not driving out of here until it melts! The white that you see on the driveway isn't snow. It's ice.

 So what have I been doing this past week? Well, since I couldn't weave the rugs I'd planned, I did sew on some quilts that I've been working on, works in progress. Plus, we emptied more boxes. The good news is that all the boxes that were in my studio, under tables, shoved wherever we could find room, etc are upstairs. Most of them are in the hall right now. Understand that the hall had been full of boxes that I went through already. We keep bringing boxes closer to where I can work on them and as I do, bring more. We're organizing it all. My Mother in law liked teddy bears and had a bunch of them. I keep thinking of more places to take them but since we haven't finished going through the boxes and I still run across a box or two full of them, we haven't done anything with them yet. There's got to be somewhere that I can take these little 3 inch bears, too. The bigger ones are easy, the tiny ones are harder to figure out. I don't want to just give them to KARM (Knox Area Rescue) but I will and they will sell them unless I can figure out someplace that will have a good use for them.

School's closed today again, even some colleges, so we're not out of the woods yet.
Normally when we have episodes of weather like this, it'll melt in a few hours or at least the next day. This is one of those epic storms that will be added to the list of  storms of note here!!
Me, I'm heading down to the studio to work on some projects for awhile and then I'll come back up to empty another couple of boxes. No telling what treasures I'll rediscover since these boxes had been under my table for at least a year and we've seen so much stuff, it's hard to remember what was in them!
Here's hoping that we can meet tomorrow at the center but at this point, I'm not sure it's going to happen. It'll have to melt a bunch out here in the back country alot more than it has so far!!
Until next week, keep weaving and hope my brake arrives!!
Carol