Dec 29 - power and phone back

It's the little things in life that are special, like having power and telephone. I'm definitely going to be looking into a standby generator with an automatic transfer switch, hooked up to my big honkin propane tank.

No sooner had I gotten back from town with more gas -- well, perhaps an hour later -- and the power came back on. Next the telephone rang -- Bonnie, calling from Sudbury, to ask if we needed anything at the grocery store. We have telephone ! No, amazingly enough, the General Store had lactose free milk (Emma), orange juice (whoever), plain yogurt (Emma), Italian whole wheat bread (whoever), and it was all fresh. During the last major power outage the General Store had to throw away a lot of perishables because they didn't have a generator large enough to handle the load. This time they were prepared. This time the outage was "only" 24 hours.

The temperature is starting to fall. Tomorrow's high is supposed to be -13C. The beach is gone. The water has risen at least eight or nine inches in the last 24 hours. My small floating dock, likely still frozen to the bottom in the cove, is now under a few inches of water & ice.

My hands smell fishy again, or as usual, depending on how you look at it. We now have four pike in the freezer. David pulled in another while I was in town and left it in the snow for me to clean.

More later ...

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It's morning again.

It gradually dropped to a couple of degrees below freezing over the course of the day and we got about two inches of snow. David and I shoveled some snow and smoothed out the sledding slope.

Now it is cold, at -14C or thereabouts. It's light out and with a little snow on the slope it won't be too icy ... maybe yes, maybe no, we'll see. The lake is white again, albeit a little darker at the edges because there will only be a half-inch of ice in spots. Those spots are fairly shallow, just over boot-height, good for a soaker but not dangerous per se.

Since it is light, I should probably get the fishing rigs out. I may need to use the auger since the holes will have frozen over. We're already at the high temperature for the day, expecting lows of -18C, -21C, -24C over the next days. Winter has returned !

Stef and Aaron will be arriving sometime today in time for our Christmas celebration and dinner. That is assuming, of course, that they got their car fixed yesterday. I'm sure that we would have heard had they not.

That's it for now ...