Tis the season...

to wish everyone a very
MERRY CHRISTMAS!

God blessed us with his Son, and continues to bless us each day!
Enjoy your celebration with family and friends!

Power!

Power! After six days without, we have power in our rural area! And T. "gets" to go back to school tomorrow. :-)

There have been crews from Texas and who knows where all helping get the lines back up. Today I heard the number of electric poles down in our two-county cooperative was more like 1300 than the 800 I mentioned before. We really appreciate the help everyone has given.

We all rely so much on electrical power. But there's a much greater power that we don't always remember to acknowledge. Thank you, Lord, for your wonder working power!

And then came snow.

Here's the same broken tree shown yesterday from the front porch, with snow covering the ice and downed limbs now.

Here's a view out back from the kitchen window.
The photo may have to be enlarged to see where the limbs are broken off the elm in the background. The clean cut you see on the hackberry limb on the ground is where B used the chainsaw, so it wouldn't be hanging in the air.

Brrrr (adford Pear Tree, and others)

It feels like I've been gone forever, but that's only because I couldn't post for awhile. (You probably didn't even miss me here, since I don't tend to post every day. :-) I haven't had a chance to catch up on other blogs yet, just in case anyone wondered why I haven't commented much lately!)

Late Monday we started hearing strange sounds outside that continued through the night and next morning. It was the sound of tree branches breaking and dropping because of the ice that had accumulated on them. Daylight showed some of the damage, with more breaking under the weight as time went on. Of course we had no power, because the same thing had happened to the power lines. Our rural electric cooperative has at least 800 poles to replace. There has been no school since Tuesday, and still none tomorrow (Friday)! We're doing okay at our house, since B and M hooked up the generator that we have--so we have heat, water and electricity. What we didn't have for awhile was telephone/internet service because the system's back-up batteries ran down until they could get generators around to recharge them. Enough chatter... here are some photos! (most are better if you click to enlarge)

The Bradford (of Nov. 16's post)--surprisingly, it only lost one branch, and will likely shape back up nicely once the ice is gone.

The hackberry also surprised us with just a few branches toward the top broken off.

A roadside view of the front yard shows "pruned" maples and others.

These branches from the tree just outside our front door covered the ground. We lost some bigger limbs in the backyard, but I don't have good shots of those.

Icicles and shadows on the garage.

Heavy, but pretty!

Go to the ant...

Just for the record, the grumpiness is not so severe now. :-)
The list of stuff needing done is just as big as ever, but that's life.

We have snow!

Some blogger friends and I are reading through Proverbs this month. Verses 6-11 (in the Revised Standard Version) from today's chapter have been favorites of mine for a long time. "Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways and be wise." Prov. 6:6

Grrr...

This is how I feel today,
because this is how I feel today.