Snow and being Sequestered!

Grand Traverse County has been deemed a disaster area after Saturday's snow storm. More than 30,000 people were left without power when an average of 18 inches of heavy wet snow was piled on us in one 24 hour period. Today is Monday now and we are still trying to get ourselves unburied. Branches came down in my yard, pictured here. Also
my neighbor had several trees just pulled right over because of the snow. This one landed on her roof. And the last picture shows one of the trees from her yard bent over the fence and our cable line literally holding it up. I had Jake go out there and hit the snow off the tree to get it to stand back up. Saturday while we were outside trying to shovel the wind would come up and the snow would fall in big wet clumps down into the tops of our jackets, sliding all the way down our backs! We all needed hot bathes when we got the cars unstuck.
It took all our ingenuity to get them out too. There was no power so the electric starter on the snow blower wouldn't work. We had to shovel. We have an electric stove so we couldn't cook any food. We thought about the gas grill which would have worked except we went ahead and had sandwiches for lunch and by dinner time the power was back on. In this we were fortunate. Our friends were without power for more than 48 hours some of them. They were keeping warm in front of fireplaces and gas ovens.

This is the first major disaster I've ever actually been in when my life was in danger, and I must tell you, I got a little scared. It's making me see that we rely way to much on electricity.

On the lighter side, with out the Internet to distract us, my family gathered around the kitchen table and played a game of Scrabble. I got interested in a good book that I've been meaning to read and everyone took a good long nap. The DVD player began to blink when the power came back on, and my husband's computer started making noises. That is what gave us the first clues that the power was back. We sighed with relief and turned the heat up!

We'd had a few days before this relative nice weather, but I was sequestered nonetheless with my writing. I managed to finish the book I had begun during last November's Nanowrimo. It is the pre-quel to "A Haunting at Mackinac." It's called "Blackburn" and is about a man who fights the war of 1812 on Mackinac Island. Those of you who have read my first book will recognize some of the characters and events. It needs a lot of work though, it needs fleshing out. There are a lot of Telling details in there, and it would be better if I could figure out how to Show them instead!

So I've put it away for a couple of months so I can get back to it with a fresh eye. Meanwhile, I'm getting back into Tessa's Travels and will do more Blogging on that sight as I get into it. So keep an eye out for that. I'm learning Scrivener now so I can be ready to use it in April for Scriptfrenzy.

Speaking of Scriptfrenzy, there is still time to vote on which project you would like me to pursue first. I'm thinking that the second choice will be a vehicle for that great actor of small stature Peter Dinkledge who most of you will have seen in the Movie Station Agent, if you missed him the HBO series "Game of Thrones". Of course I will write it two ways, one for him addressing the special problems short people have with dating, and one for normal sized actors in which case anyone from Brad Pit to Zach Ephron could play him.

While I've been sitting here updating my Blog, I noticed a yellow throated bird out here at my feeder. It's a yellow-throated Vireo. Only took about 15 minutes of Internet research to figure it out. I tried to take a good picture of it through the window but my camera is not allowing it.

Have a nice winter! In my neck of the woods it's going to last at three more days, but rumor has it it's going to be 60 degrees by Thursday. Ah, Michigan! don't you just love it!