Thursday, December 14, 2017

Winter Storm 2017

I know I've said it before, but it bears saying again....The weather sure is interesting!

We've heard this one before..."We might see some snow later in the week!"
Hahahaaa, yeah right!
Mayyyybe in January, February... Early December? No.

I was about 99.9% positive it wouldn't snow, or at most, flurries for a minute.
I think pretty much everyone else thought the same thing, since a lot of the schools didn't close Friday.
Friday morning we got up to get Ryan off to work, and it was raining and I was like, see? Told ya.

Until I got on FB and saw everyone already posting it was snowing where they were. I said, Uh. Oh.
Ryan went out to crank up his car and came back in and said, It's snowing.

I could still hear it raining, not even sleeting, so how bad could the snow be?

This was about 7:30am. Not too bad.


This was about 9:15am. Can't tell it under my large Oak trees, but there's about 2 inches on the exposed ground by now. Still coming down heavily. But, the news casters says the pavement temps are still above freezing, so the roads should be okay.


 Dropping Kev off at PT at 10am. It's crazy out here, y'all.

Uh, dang. I hope we can make it home an hour from now.


Driving back to wait for Kev to finish at PT. I tried to go to Dollar Tree, but they had closed up.


Supposed to be a Walmart on that hill.


10:49 am, headed home. The roads are icing up. 


10:55am, my road.


Awesome Snow peeps!


We decided to drive on around the block, to see what we could see.
      Here's looking at our house from across the field. It's the one you can't really see under all the big trees.


The very old church is beautiful in the snow. I nearly got stuck in the driveway though. At least, I think I was in the driveway. Couldn't see it under the snow.


Kev got out to take some pictures of the church, and decided to throw snowballs at me in the truck.
     He says it wasn't cold out there. I'm pretty sure he's part dang ol' Yankee.
           I did have it about 150F° in the truck, though, lol.


All the big trees  were sooo pretty.
      You know, until they started breaking and snatching power lines down.


Luckily our power didn't go out. I do not know how it didn't - but am so glad it didn't!  I was positive it would. It blinked off and back on a couple of times. Exploding transformers was lighting up the sky like lightning.
I looked outside one time and the sky lit up, and then the neighbor's across the field Christmas lights and outside light were dark.
I could see both my next door neighbors had power, but couldn't tell if my across the street neighbor had power or oil lamp light. I called and she said they had power and were warm and fine (Thank Goodness. Bless her heart, but I'm not sure I could have put up with her all weekend.)

I was sitting in my recliner watching tv and heard SHCKCHCKCH...WHOMP! from outside. Got up and headed away from the windows.  I didn't know if it was a tree falling towards me or what. It happened a couple more times, my neighbor Miz Anita's Cedar tree was dropping some huge branches right in front of her porch.
Amazingly none hit the house, and only clipped her power line enough to make it swing a bit, but didn't pull it down.


We had several branches break, but none close to the house.
The Catalpa (Worm) tree broke a couple big branches, and a big one down on the fence line:

Before:


After:


When it stopped snowing, which I think if I remember rightly was early Saturday morning, so less than 24 hours, we had about 9 inches of snow here.
Some other places south and east of us had a foot.

Haha, Surprise! says Mother Nature.
    It sure was.

{The rest of this is just ranting, you can skip it.}

As I said before, I didn't believe it would really snow.
Anyone with an ounce of brain knows Weather isn't an exact science. I would say it does what it wants to, but if you don't believe weather is some sort of a Magical Being, then simply, there are way too many variables that have to come together just right for this or that to happen.
Saying it will or won't snow is like saying it will or won't come a tornado. There's simply no way of knowing for certain until or unless it happens.

I just think it's pretty amazing the meteorologists can say, Get ready, because it looks like there's a good chance it could snow (or rain, or storm, or come a frost).
A hundred years ago, people had to figure out the weather happenings for themselves. I bet no Georgians would have seen this big, early December snow event coming.

But people on *socialist* media were so hateful and ugly to our local meteorologists that they were apologizing, and one said he was having to take a break from all social media, it was so awful.

People are horrible. And stupid. 

A news reporter was out at a school that...okay, they messed up, but they're human just like the rest of us....The reporters were interviewing *angry* and *upset* parents there having to pick their kids up. The parents were all, Blah Blah Blah! Blah Blah Blah!
All I heard was, "I'm a grown ass adult but too stupid to know my child's safety is first and foremost my responsibility. I see it snowing out there, but if the school says it's open, I'ma send my kid and let them worry about taking care of them."
"Oh, now they can't take care of them and I got to do it? Rant, rant, rant, blah blah blah!"

Then there were those whose power went out.
Hey, here's an idea - waste your cellphone battery time getting on FB whining and bitching instead of conserving it in case you have a real emergency. Derp.

I guess what pizzes me off the most is how none of them take a single bit of responsibility for taking care of their selves. All their troubles they were having, were someone else's fault.

They weren't told it was going to for certain snow 9 to 12 inches, so they made bad decisions, but that was the meteorologist's fault.
People ought not have to think for themselves, gahhhh!

Some of the school's admins didn't make good decisions regarding closing school - meteorologist's fault. Parents sent their little brats to school anyway - school's fault. 

Here in Georgia we have lots of trees, lots of big trees. We also have things like severe weather, tornadoes, hurricane/tropical storms, winds, droughts, and snow and/or ice. Any number of things that can cause trees/branches to come down and take out power lines.
This usually happens in a relatively small area, but you never know exactly where that area will be. It also, on occasion, happens in a larger area, in the case of this recent snow storm.

Given all that, if you are in such dire and desperate need of power, why in the name of Sam Hill do you not have a generator to hold you until the power company can get you back on line?
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on the power company's part.

I don't have a generator, but, so far, I haven't found myself in dire or desperate need of electricity that I can't survive a few days with my oil lamps and gas fireplace and cook stove.
If I ever do find myself in that situation, you can bet I'll have a generator in my store room.

With the wide spread power outages, some of the water pumping stations were effected, and some people had a boil water advisory, some lost water altogether.

I don't even know how many times people have been told and told and told and told and told - keep emergency water on hand AT ALL TIMES.
Anything could happen, at any time, and cause water outages. Weather, terror attacks, malfunctioning equipment, main breaks, etc.

If you're caught by a surprise snow storm - or any other event - and you have no water, it's no one's fault but your own!

This snow storm wasn't even exactly a complete surprise. We were warned it could snow. We were warned it could snow several inches. Was it likely to? No. But guess what, it did.

I attended a commissioner's meeting on Tuesday - different issue - but a woman was sitting in front of us running her mouth at someone else, blah blah blah  "the inCOMPetence!" blah blah "inCOMPetence!" blah blah.
A little later during the 'Citizen's Signed Up To Speak' part of the meeting, she got up and ranted on about not having water and how VITal water was to LIVE and that they needed to hire some proFESSIONals to figure out whatever the PROBlems are, to make sure that CITizens of this COUNTY are able to have WATER...blah blah blah.

I tuned out her little tirade - it was annoying, as was her Yankee accent.

I hate to be racist - well, I care about as much as they hate being bigoted - but I blame all this snow on Yankees.
They move down here to the South, but then want to change everything to be like the Northern hellholes they moved away from.
They can't live without the Government telling them how. They want the Government around here to take care of them, when we're all used to being more self-sufficient.They want the Government to tell us all how to live too - by their Yankee ways, of course.

They're actually racist, but they project their prejudices on us Southerners. They act all Superior and Holier Than Thou, but I have never met people more hateful, rude, miserable, and bigoted than these damn ol' Yankees down here.
Or in Nebraska/Kansas. Good God, if I never step foot in either of those states again it'll still be too soon!

I'm pretty sure they somehow managed to bring their miserable cold, snowy weather down here, too, because all they do is whine and moan and complain about our hot/humid weather.
People! Feel free to go. the hell. away.

I attended a zoning board meeting a couple weeks ago, and low and behold, some old Yankee fart got up ranting on about the builder wanting to add more homes in the subdivision he was living in.
He rambled on, pretty much intelligibly - he pronounced the road names wrong, and he kept naming off the subdivision by the wrong name until his wife finally stood up and corrected him.

So then another lady got up to talk, also a Yankee, a lying, shifty, liar Yankee.
This (censored) was up there arguing about not allowing more houses to be built in her neighborhood, after she insulted us last year because (basically, we were halting Progress in the county by not giving her client part/easement of our property for his gas station).

Last year I wasn't as racist towards Yankees, so when she called up wanting to talk with us about our property, I had no problem meeting with her.
Until she lied. Blatantly. More than a couple of times.
Clearly she thinks we're just a bunch of dumb, backwoods hillbillies that don't know no better.

She back-handedly insulted us, thinking we'd be too stupid to know that was what she was doing.

I'm not one to cut off my nose to spite my face, (well, I try not to be. Sometimes I get mad) so I tried to deal with her all the way up to the point that she tried to bluff me by saying they no longer needed our property, but be sure and let her know if we changed our minds about selling and they might consider buying it anyway.
I told her we weren't interested in selling, thanks, buh-bye.

There's a lot more to that story, but that's another story for another day. 

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