My lovely little “first snow of the year” turned into 15cm (six inches) of heavy fluffy blizzard.
I may not have mentioned, but my wife is out of town this week, back in Ontario for a family emergency. This means it’s just Sarah and I here, and that means that Sarah is already spending longer at the day care than she does when Trish and I are both in town. We have our work schedules staggered so that Sarah never has to be at day care more than 6 hours on any given day. Of course when only one of us is in town, it’s tricky to make her stay less than 8.5 hours, to cover the workday plus travel time.
Looking at the snow continuing to fall, I decided to leave work early so I could pick up Sarah and beat the traffic, since the first snow of the year always means lots of people having stupid, avoidable accidents. I really wanted to avoid leaving here at 5 and not getting to the day care until 6.
This is what I saw in front of my place as I was leaving:
To make a long story short, it took me an hour to get to the day care (normally a 15 minute drive), and over 80 minutes to get home. I swear at one point visibility became zero as the sky filled with snowflakes that had to be two inches across.
I note that Sarah was a superstar during this 80 minutes of painful driving, all of which took place later in the day than her normal supper time–she was patient and calm, and chatty, despite the fact that she must have been hungry, tired of being in the car, etc. Frankly she was much calmer and more pleasant than her mother would have been in the same situation without any snack items. Heh.
Most of the delay was due to people who had slid off the road, blocking the roads I needed to use to get home. Here’s the story from the CBC:
The snow was making the highways and roads slippery. In fact, RCMP in Halifax said there were at least 10 accidents in the first hour.
When we finally did turn off the highway into our little sheltered street I could instantly see that at some time during the day car trip the power had gone out in our neighbourhood.
[Insert my standard rant about Nova Scotia Power’s continual surprise at the notion that it might actually snow in Canada, you know, in winter.]
[Insert my other standard rant about the danger of privatizing essential services.]
So, Sarah and I got home two and a half hours later than she normally gets home, to a darkened house.
We ate cold pizza in the dark, read some stories by flashlight while wrapped in blankets, watched a few minutes of a DVD about animals in the jungle on a laptop that still had a charge in its batteries, and then I put her down for the night. During the whole thing I was hiding both my rage at NS Power, and my concerns about what might happen if the power was not restored soon (none of our heating systems work without power except the fireplace, and without a circulating fan 85% of the heat from a fireplace goes up the chimney).
I did call the power company (on my cell phone–our landline phones, being based on the cable system, don’t work when there is no power; no power to the repeaters means no signal to my house, the one down side compared to more traditional phones) and was told they were estimating power would be restored at 9PM. Last outage, when I was told the same thing the power actually did not come on for two more days, so I was not expecting much.
To my surprise, the power came back on at 8:57. Yay. (Even better, it seems that FOR THE FIRST TIME, all the UPS stuff in the lab worked, with various machines hibernating or shutting down cleanly, etc, so it was easy to get all the computers back up with no loss of data.)
I think Sarah thought the whole thing was fun–a weird game of Daddy’s. I count that as a success.
