Writing from the Internet cafe at Flour Garden …

We’re into our fourth day without power, and without our HVAC, except when we’re running our backup generator. We have no secondary source of heat, such as a woodburning stove.

By our second day we were able to shovel enough snow from the driveway to get out for awhile. If it weren’t for our pets, we’d probably have headed for the valley and warm lodging days ago.

I went out to the garage this morning — which we often use in the winter as a spare “refrigerator” — and for the first time ever I felt no subjective difference in temperature there from the temperature inside the house! The upside of this, I suppose, is that now we can just use our house as a spare refrigerator.

The thermometer on the bookcase in our livingroom read 48 degrees when we got up at 7 AM today.

I heard on KVMR this morning that there are about 500 people remaining without power in Nevada City, and about 50 in Grass Valley (where we live). This means that we have the honor of being members of the last group here to get power restored, and as of this writing we have no idea when that may be. PG&E promises more “information” by midnight tonight.

A number of old-timers in this area have mentioned that there were big snowstorms in the 1970s, but not nearly as many outages as we have now. Isn’t PG&E doing enough tree work before winter to prevent many of these outages?

This is our third winter in Grass Valley since we moved into the house we built here twenty years ago. We learn something new about survival each winter. This winter our big lesson is … we need a secondary source of heat! Yesterday we went over to Sierra Timberline and started shopping for a fireplace insert.

Listening to chatter here at Flour Garden, I realize that we are surrounded by refugees from Nevada City and Grass Valley (some from our neighborhood), all waiting to hear from PG&E that their power is restored.