Well, I've had an interesting weekend. Buffalo, NY weather being strange as always decided that last thursday would be a great time to have a big snowstorm. It managed to catch the city and surrounding areas off guard as weather forcasts predicted the storm to hit the next day. Also, since trees still had leaves, the snow managed to take down something like half of the tree branches in the area, knocking out power to over 400,000 homes in the process, including mine. In fact, the power wire going to my house was ripped right off of the side of the house where it connects to by our maple tree. During the time the power was off, we fortunately had an old sears 1300 watt generator. We simply plugged it into a wall plug in the garage with a male-to-male plug, and powered the whole house. Being an old generator, it didn't have any circuit breaker or fuse, so you didn't have to worry about anything when plugging things in. It would just slow down with higher loads, unlike newer ones which have circuit breakers that pop if you try to plug more in. We ran two refrigerator/freezers, a chest freezer, a toaster oven, a microwave, our sump pump, heater, house lights, and naturally, my computer(but not the microwave or toaster oven at the same time as other stuff). In fact, on sunday we even ran our washing machine and (gas)clothes dryer. Each day the power was out, we, along with the 3 other people with generators on our street, had to run extension cords and the generator around to other people's houses to keep their basements from flooding. Fortunately, the power company managed to get our power back yesterday. Unfortunately, the cable going to my house for internet was ripped out of the socket on the wire going behind my house, and it has still not been fixed. I'm posting from my university right now(which was closed friday through monday). In fact, the school district my brother and sister go to has been canceled all week. Talk about a long weekend. The driving ban in the area(that everyone ignored) was lifted tuesday.
Here are my pictures of the snow for your viewing pleasure.
(click for larger size)
just to note, these were taken on saturday, after the snow had stopped falling and it had begun to melt a bit. I'll post more showing the tree damage in a bit.
As a side note, the ImageShack toolbar is really handy.
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reminds me of this:
