As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Monday night/Tuesday morning, North Canton got nailed with a lot of ice – and that part of the storm was supposed to be the ligher of the two waves we got. Last night was the “major” event of the two with us receiving another 1/2″ plus of ice – possibly a full inch. It was hard for me to tell because after the first couple jaunts out to investigate the surrounding trees started loosing limbs in earnest and while I may be adventurous I am not stupid and I know that one of those branches was bound to hit me if I went out much more into the fray. I hunkered down inside and watched the freezing rain fall for another night a causing limbs to break and transformers to put on a spectacular show. The inevitable happened around 1AM – we lost power. I knew it was bound to happen and it was only a matter of WHEN not IF.

We didn’t have power all day and by 3PM we started making preparations to get our generator going to at least get heat going in the house again. I couldn’t get a hold of AEP to find out when our power was slated to be returned but had heard from a few sources to expect no earlier than Sunday. It was pretty chilly in our house – down to near 50ºF and luckily I have a loving Kitty that wasn’t adverse to cuddling for heat (hubs had to go to work but came home early to work on getting the generator set)! Of course the way it always seems to go, as soon as we had everything set up to get the generator running again, the power was restored! I confess, I was doing a mighty big happy dance for that!

When checking back in with the world, I found out that an image of mine was shown on The Weather Channel by Jim Cantore at 10:45EST last night. That’s pretty awesome and the inner weather geek in me may have died along with the photography nerd. I also hear an image of mine was used on the WEWS website but I don’t know which one or when. Needless to say, I’m elated!

I ventured out in the early evening and took some images of the maple frozen in the front yard.

 

This is the image that Jim Cantore used on The Weather Channel.

 

I went back out about 15 minutes later and got a measurement of about 3/4″ of ice and this was around 8PM.  We had another 5 hours of freezing rain after this!

During this adventure a limb broke off the tree and scared me enough to stop taking pictures of the maple in the front yard.

 

About an hour later though I still had an itchy shutter finger so I went out from our walkout basement and stayed under the deck and captured a few more shots of the weather.

 

This image is of our neighbor’s lilac bush which was really eerie but pretty.  By far NOT a perfect shot but it was handheld, lit by a spotlight and I was getting drenched in freezing rain.  The fact it turned out at all impresses me.  LOL

 

The morning after.  I saw that my neighbors had a LOT of limbs down, which I heard falling throughout the night.  It is one of the weirdest and most ominous sounds I’ve ever heard – the creaking and cracking of a tree, the limb falling and crashing to the frozen ground and then finally breaking through the ice glaze on the snow.  It’s wild and scary.

 

Luckily my backyard was pretty good considering, just a few limbs and a lot of small branches.

 

My next door neighbors were not nearly as lucky as we were.  Here’s a shot of one of the bigger branches down in their back yard.

 

Their front yard was worse but the lucky thing is that nothing hit their house or garage.  My bedroom is right beside the garage and in the middle of the night I heard this crash and WHOOMP.  I was worried it was a roof or much worse, I think it was this all coming down at once.  Crazy!

 

I took a spin around the neighborhood and saw that a house a few doors down that probably got the shortest end of the stick (ha ha) when it came to tree branches coming down.  Their yard was LITTERED with large branches and limbs but again, luckily nothing hit their house.

 

Here’s hoping Mother Nature gives us a bit of a break and it’s back to the regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow!