Freezing Rain Sucks

I hate freezing rain. I think I mentioned this yesterday in one of my posts. Well, now I really hate it. Somewhere around 11:00 AM yesterday our power went out at the house, thanks to a very large tree limb on Dutch Hill that took out 3 power wires during it's rapid descent to earth. Of course, this limb fell because the massive weight of a 1/2" thick coating of ice was too much for it to handle.

I called the house every hour to make sure that the answering machine was picking up (a sign that the power was on). When I called at 11:30 it no longer picked up. I got home at around 12:45, and by that point the sump hole was almost full of water. I hauled water out 5 gallons at a time until I couldn't deal with it anymore and then my father and I set up his generator.

The generator ran erratically, and would stall often, usually after between 2-20 minutes of running. It was a non-stop effort through most of the afternoon and night to try and keep the generator running, as well as to plug and unplug the heater and sump pumps into the circuit that we were back-feeding the generator into. At around 10:30 I was unable to keep the generator running. At around midnight I cried "Uncle" and my father brought up his gas powered water pump, but fortunately he was able to dick with the generator and keep it running long enough to help get the basement back under control. We found that the carb was loose, and after we got the basement under control we were going to try and work on the carb so that it would run better. Finally at 1:00, just as we were preparing to screw with the carb, the power came back on.

All night long I was up and down the basement stairs, and yanking on that generator pull cord. From around midnight on, my father was there doing most of the work on the generator, which is probably a good thing because I was exhausted. If it wasn't for the non-stop dicking with the generator and my father's tremendous help, my basement would have taken on more water than I could have hauled out one pail at a time, and would likely have caused significant damage.

The next step is to get that generator running reliably or to get a new one so that in the future we can handle these power outages better. It's also time to rig up a battery powered pump system so that we'll be covered even when we're not home.

If we could have just gotten a normal frigging snow storm instead of this freezing rain bullshit, I could have spent last night snowmobiling instead of dicking with a pond in my basement.