We Wish You a Merry Power Outage

This is my third winter here in Twin Peaks, and there are three big things I've learned:

1. The first two winters were a joke.
2. You need a generator to live up here.
3. Or...you must enjoy reenacting primordial days of lighting candles and stoking fires for warmth to live up here.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we got hammered with snow, and our mountain lost power for four days. This week, we got hammered with more snow and lost power for two more days.

Our local tavern, the Bearclaw, is usually dead in the middle of the day. But here it was yesterday afternoon, day two of the outage:

The Bearclaw doesn't have some big awesome generator, but they do have a small one in which they're able to plug in a few things...enough to entice mountain folks to seek refuge there.

That being said, we actually have a generator. Our property came with one, and it's amazing. It runs on natural gas and turns on automatically during an outage, powering everything on our property. So we pretty much live like kings during a power outage (though we do look like assholes when our Christmas lights are blazing National-Lampoon-style against the pitch-black canvas of our street). The problem is during outages we have no WiFi, and spotty cell service at best, which is why we went to the Bearclaw. Boredom of course, but more than that, the community up here relies on each other for information during storms--we have what we call "Rim pages" on Facebook for this very reason--so you feel cut-off from everyone when you have no WiFi, and start craving interactions with others going through similar issues.

I have to admit, the Bearclaw yesterday was spirit-lifting. The atmosphere was warm and festive, with all of these bedraggled mountain peeps gathered together, making the best of the situation.

Which makes me realize there are three kinds of people who live in the mountains:

1. The ones who complain about everything.
2. The ones who get annoyed by the ones complaining about everything. (i.e. "Suck it up buttercup. You chose to live here.")
3. The ones who go to the bar and have a beer.

I've decided to be person #3. 

Here's a quick video of our last snow: Let it Snow

Here's Mr. Lump, our lazy snowman (built into the hillside by Trin and Elijah so he can look out over the street).

And here are the icicles growing from our roof. 

Anyone up for a good ole' throwback game of Frogger? You get to be the frog, but instead of dodging cars, you're dodging icy spears that could very well impale you. Fun for the whole family!

Hope your Christmas was wonderful and you have an amazing 2020.