It's finally winter

Well, our first real winter storm this year has arrived.

We got a few inches of snow last night, and intermittent ice and freezing rain since this afternoon. Power and cable has blinked a couple of times, but so far no extended outage. We're lucky compared to some. Apparently large sections of Louisville either have no power, or the power is very flaky.

Kentucky is under an emergency declaration, and I'm staying off of the roads.

My employer has asked a few of us to stay up and monitor our systems from home. I'm currently on a chat line with a few of my co-workers while we watch the servers and databases. My bosses decided to let us do this remotely because of both the danger of being on the roads and the chance that once we got to work, we wouldn't be able to leave safely for days.

It's kind of fun to picture what the situation is across Louisville and southern Indiana by seeing who drops off the chat line and then gets back on when their power/Internet gets restored. Several folks have reported trees falling in their neighborhoods due to the ice.

So far, I haven't heard anything too big break, although I'm pretty sure we lost a branch or two off of our maple tree. I'll go out tomorrow morning and check on how things look.

We're all snug here at Casa de Oso. We have plenty of firewood and candles in case the lights go out, and I've kept a fire going all day so that the kids could warm up when they come in from playing outside.

Junior Bear did a small amount of shoveling this morning so that we and our neighbor could get to and from our houses, but I'll wait until it stops snowing to get out there and shovel for real. This isn't the Great White North where you have to shovel every 2 hours or you end up shoveling 36 inches of snow at once.

The kids were off school today and will be off tomorrow as well. Luckily, they were able to get out of the house for a few hours this afternoon when there was a break in the weather, and they did their snow gopher imitations. They had to be brushed off at the back door because they looked like snowmen when they wanted to come in. Even with that, they were going stir crazy this evening until I told them to break out the Uno cards and go downstairs. They're good kids, and love to play board games. Better that than watching TV all day.

I'm going to hibernate this morning once my relief gets on-line, and then Junior Bear and I will be shoveling our way out of the snow/ice bank. Where's that global warming I've heard so much about?