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Monday, January 31, 2005

Panic in the Peach State Posted by Hello
(or, as we call it everywhere else I've lived: "Winter")


All day Friday, weathercasters around the south were in a tizzy. "Winter Storm!" they shouted! "Take Cover!"

We weren't too worried here in C-Town. We were supposed to hit 33 degrees for an overnight low. At worst, we might drop down to 31 or 32, and that meant the rain would freeze. At best, we might stay at 33 or 34, and we'd just get plain ol' rain.

It started raining late Friday night. I woke up briefly at about 5:30 in the morning, and all seemed well. I woke up again a little later, but this time, I had no idea what time it was, because the power was off. I grabbed another comforter and burrowed a little bit deeper, and went back to sleep.

Turns out we got freezing rain here... The first, I've been told, in thirty-some years. Our power didn't come back on until about 1:00 in the afternoon Saturday. Kristi, one of our co-workers, still didn't have power as of Sunday afternoon.

There were a lot of downed branches, like this one near our apartment.
Posted by Hello


I might add, that every time we have any kind of storm, that particular tree sheds a branch. I thought she would have been bald after our crazy hurricane season this summer. I guess she still had another limb to shed.

Anyway, events all around C-Town were postponed or cancelled on Saturday, though Tim Hudson's annual baseball camp went on as scheduled. One or two school districts in neighboring counties have already cancelled classes for Monday. It really is a foreign world to me. Growing up, it took a blizzard for our schools to get cancelled... and even then, it wasn't any guarantee. One winter, when I was teaching at Truman, we had a horrible ice storm. Half the trees on campus collapsed (one of our colleagues said the campus looked like a war zone, he felt like he was in Beirut). The building that held my office lost electricity... and even then, they wouldn't cancel classes.

By the way, things here are mostly back to normal. The ice had melted off all the trees by mid-afternoon on Saturday, and our temperatures were back in the low 50s and the skies were partly sunny. So I guess winter's over for now. Good thing, too, since CSU starts baseball season on Wednesday!

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