Category: Local

The snow and ice storm (see previous entry) has knocked out power all over town including my house. I’m posting this from my cell phone. Tree branches have breaking off all over my neighborhood from the snow and if you stand outside for a few minutes, you can hear the cracking wood echo throughout the area.

I’m just really glad we have a fresh load of firewood so we don’t freeze. It’s a nice 71° in the house right now.

The snow has appeared to stop for a bit. I’m going to go see if I can knock down some snow off my trees.

Update later in the evening: The power was out for about 5½ hours or so. Our leafy trees all survived, but I can’t say the same about the rest of Bend. Our neighbors all lost many branches. We have a 20-foot chunk of one of our neighbor’s trees that has taken up residence in our backyard after cracking off high up on the tree and bouncing off our shed. The folks living behind us have a large chunk of something laying on their roof.

We drove around town a bit now that the roads have melted off a bit, and the damage is mostly to the deciduous trees around town that had yet to lose their leaves for the season (as this is really early to have this kind of snow). The wet heavy snow stuck would usually have nothing to stick to, but the leaves gave the snow something to stick to. The trees’ branches couldn’t handle the weight, and just snapped left and right. A gigantic poplar tree up the road from us lost a ton of branches and made a big mess out of the road that I had to move to get out of the neighborhood. Drake Park was a mess of broken branches throughout the park. We saw a nearly full-size tree that just missed clobbering an SUV on the West side of town. KTVZ has a decent gallery of photos of some of the carnage.

The theory is that tomorrow’s weather is supposed to warm up, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

I tried. I really tried. But despite attempts with two different cars, I can’t make it out of my neighborhood here in Bend and make it to work out in Sunriver. We have at least two inches of very wet heavy snow that makes the road nearly impossible to drive on without studded/snow tires (and studded tires aren’t legal for nearly a month). It’s especially bad when you’re making the first tracks out of your neighborhood like I was this morning. All the trees and bushes in the neighborhood are bent over or being crushed by the heavy snow. The trees and bushes still have all their leaves, so they’re holding on to the snow. I’ve already gone and shaken off the snow on a couple of our trees so the branches don’t all break off. Trying to get up the street, there were several trees that had large branches broken off onto the road that I had to move out of my way before I could try to drive.

Looking at the Sunriver webcam, it looks like there might be less at my office than there is here in Bend, which is unusual. But I ran into the same thing last night when driving back from the game last night — there was hardly any snow up on the pass (light dusting), but ran into more in the lower elevations.

Hopefully some of this will melt off a bit so I can make it up my street tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m working from home today and keeping the fireplace stoked and just hoping that nothing breaks at the office that requires me to make it out there.

The war has already begun in my neighborhood — really, it’s been going for days already. I have the TV turned up don’t have to listen to what sound like bombs going off every 30 seconds. Everybody already knows how I feel about this holiday, and even if I wanted to be out enjoying it, my youngest daughter is sick, so I’m home with her while my wife and other daughter are out having a good ol’ time.

While everybody’s out boozing and blowing stuff up, lest we never forget what this holiday is really about.

Anybody want to make any bets on percentage of the Butte that gets put up in flames this year? It was pretty hot and dry today, so I expect some flames.