Photo: All the nasty weather meant it was time to move the tractor to the barn where it can be kept snow free and ready for plow work. This chicken found it a handy perch for observing goings-on outside the barn.
Well, in the end it wasn't our power that we lost, but our telephone and internet connection. Fairpoint, who runs the local phone lines, had it hooked up again pretty quickly, but then it went out again last night sometime, and was again restored this morning.
Even so, when the phone goes out, you either do without, or go find a phone that works to tell the phone company. I had to do the latter Friday, even after I posted saying I wouldn't, since we both had college work to do for which we needed the Internet. I drove to college to tell the phone company, but ended up staying all day. Not at all what I had planned.
This bendy birch tree was on Great Farm Road as I left. Someone took care of it by the time I came back, probably our neighbor to the north, Hamilton. We have excellent neighbors, which we do not take for granted, after experiencing our neighbor at the Bale House who threatened to shoot our dogs. I try to help Hamilton and his family out whenever I can, and he reciprocates.
In Maine, you need your neighbors. The normal atomistic individual view of American life falls down when you have blizzards, ice storms, wind storms, floods and hurricanes, four or five regular weather emergencies every year.
This afternoon's trip to the hardware store provided the neighborly intelligence that lots of other folks around here lost their power, and are still without now, almost 48 hours after the event. Crews are driving our way from neighboring states, but it may take a few days. Our house happened to be on an unaffected spur line. For once.
Some Mainers without wood stoves or some form of back-up heat will get cold houses as a result, and have to go to motels or to the various shelters the state has opened. The weather is good for driving, if cold, so Mainers won't be hurting too much. Generally, we're used to it, and plan for it. At the Womerlippi farm, we use wood stoves for heat and cooking and oil lamps for light, as well as inverters running off the truck, and so we'd be fine, albeit reading books rather than watching TV. But we would never go to a shelter, unless the house burned down. We have animals to look after.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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