Gotta vent a bit because these last two days have sucked and it isn't even COVID-19 related. So I've been on "vacation" the last two weeks, back to work Saturday. I work in a nursing home so I fully expected it to be canceled and was checking for messages from work every day. But no, I got my time off. For the most part it's been fine, I wasn't planning on leaving the house much anyway, this was more of a spring cleaning type of vacation. I've got a mountain of cardboard and garbage at the front door waiting for me to haul it to the dump.
But everything fell apart Thursday. It rained all morning followed by a wet, heavy snow in the afternoon and all night. Soft ground plus sticky snow equals big trouble. Lights flickered a few times, power went out momentarily a couple times and then went out completely at 8:40pm. I'm a night owl, I had only been awake since 3:30pm so I could tell this was going to be a long night. Central Maine Power wasn't being particularly informative. Usually they text updates regularly with updates on cause and estimates on when it would be back. What I got was one text at 9:30pm... and that was it. No updates at all and the website only said "assessing" the whole time. They're reps weren't any more helpful, basically shifting blame back on customers saying they've been telling us this could happen for days and we should have been prepared. Not sure what they expected us to do about it, but it lead to a lot of angry tweets from people complaining about having stockpiles of food in their fridges and freezers getting warm, especially after saying outages could last days. Speaking of food I couldn't exactly cook (my grill was buried under snow constantly coming off the roof) or go out and even if I could pretty much everything closes early now anyway. Leftover cold chicken and Pop Tarts it was.
Anyway, put on another layer of clothes because it was getting chilly and spent the rest of the night opening Transformers I hadn't gotten to yet and listening to Twincast Podcasts on my phone since it doesn't use much power or data, among other things. Good thing I had charged my phone earlier. By flashlight (which I had a bunch handy because power went out less than a month ago on St. Patrick's Day) I opened Earthrise Astrotrain, Selects Kraken, Siege Caliburst and Sports Car Patrol (thought I had opened them, but all these cars and guns run together, found them cleaning), and Studio Series bike sisters and Soundwave. Trying to get those sisters transformed by flashlight balanced on my shoulder with no instructions is quite the challenge! Thought about tackling Lio Convoy, but during one of the podcasts Scotty was adamant about not trying to hot shot him and instructions being a must so I didn't chance him.
Just as the sun started coming up (but still full on snowing, it's actually still lightly snowing now) the power came on at 5:30am. Looked through the windows when it was bright enough for a quick damage assessment, not seeing anything really broken tree-wise, but lots of the young trees have bent over completely with the tops frozen to the ground. One tree that's probably 15' tall but probably on 5' inches at the base is bent right over into my driveway. I was looking at that tree last year wondering if it should be cut down because it was leaning a bit, but now it's completely bent over. Problem is these trees don't always spring back up when they warm up so all of these bent trees will probably need to be cut down. Anyway, I finised what I was doing before the power went out (cleaning my desk and replacing one of my two monitors with a TV), watched a few videos on YouTube and went to bed.
So then Friday afternoon... First off Selects Lobclaw was sitting on my deck box near the front door so that was good. Looks like the delivery guy must have tossed it there because my porch was covered with snow and there were no foot prints. Whatever, it wasn't going to hurt anything and there wasn't any snow on the deck box itself. Shoveling the porch sucked. I have a covered porch, but also a metal roof that normally throws light snow away from the house as it slides off, but being so heavy the snow just dumped straight down and then back onto the porch. It's a small porch, about 8' x 4' or so, but about 3' of snow in places piled up on it. Just wet, heavy, and miserable to shovel. Now my left shoulder is killing me, great.
Cleaned off my car loaded it with garbage, went to the dump... closed. WTF!? They're only open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but will be closed Sunday for Easter, why are they closed!? I checked the town website, it didn't say anything about being closed. It's an essential service, they aren't supposed to be allowed to close! Unloaded my car, thankfully I've got a couple large empty garbage cans outside, but the covers are full of holes from being chewed up by raccoons. Not ideal, but better than hauling it back into the house. Apparently the town has a Facebook page, it isn't mentioned or linked to on the town website, and they announced there that the dump would be closed today.
I don't really have an ending for this rant, I've been going on for too long. I just know I've only been awake for around 4 houses and there's plenty of ways for things to still go wrong.
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Once it warmed up a little the roads were clear and new snow wasn't accumulating, I could see closing for a few hours in the morning while plows come through since the town garage is on the same gated public works road as the dump (really a transfer station but nobody calls it that).
