Sorry not be be posting earlier, but there were lots of things to be done, like rinsing and drying the clothes in the washer from last week, checking that Preacher and Helen still had power, and such. I have to load the dishwasher (I like to run it in the off peak hours, even though there is not a price differential here).
Preacher and Helen are fine, although there are still folks without power. It is going to get very cold here over the next few days, so I will keep the propane and the catfish cooker inside for the time being.
I promised to tell you about by next door neighbor, the one with the trees. This guy is wonderful.
His trees were the ones in most of the pictures that contributed downed limbs here. He came out, after the danger of even more falling, and cut them up and hauled them away. THAT is a good neighbor. Many would have laughed and said, "Boy, you have a mess!" Not him. He was honorable, and now my yard is clear. I appreciate folks like him.
Back to heat when things get ugly. For those of you that have natural gas, you are lucky. For those who have propane (also called "liquefied petroleum", or LP gas) you are also somewhat lucky. However, those devices work only when there is electricity to circulate the air, if any of those are central units.
I grew up with free standing gas heaters. They had the radiant elements in the back to increase the heat thrown into the room, because irradiation is a straight line, electromagnetic phenomenon, and the heat from the combusting fuel is almost completely from convection. It makes a difference.
Back when I was little, my Grandmum had a "Warm Morning" coal stove. It was massive. It looked, to modern eyes, like a 55 gallon steel drum on legs. Firebrick lined it, and it had lower dampers to control the flow of air inside the chute.
The chute is where the ashes and "clinkers" (unburnt pieces of rock, and some solidified slag) collect for discard. The chute had a cast iron grate that supported combustion of the coal, and a device to allow one to shake out the fine, burnt material from the much more coarse coal. They called it a "Warm Morning" because you could feed fuel into it in the evening, whilst it was still burning, then choke off the dampers, and then get up at an ungodly hour, around 3:30 AM, and open the dampers. By the time it was 7:00 AM, the house was warm, or at least around the stove it was.
I digress. Over 21 folks have been found dead in connection with this storm. I am very thankful that none of my neighbors are included in that sum. My heart goes out to those who had family members who were.
The bad storm is over, and another, just snowy, one is coming tomorrow. It is forecast to be very cold, and I hope that the National Guard finds all of the folks that are in need. Finally the Governor activated every Army Guard division to help to go door to door.
Well, I promised to post this as sort of closure to the post from yesterday, and thus I did. I am still fine, and so are most folks here. I will conclude with one picture that shows how much ice was in the trees. We had a very warm spell, and there was hardly any snow on the deck, and then the ice on the trees began to fall. Here is a picture of it sort of in the middle of falling and melting away. If it had been possible to make it fall without melting, no doubt that there would have been two or three times as much.
Please feel free to comment here. Next time, we are back to science topics, and I want some hard questions.
Warmest regards,
Doc
