Sunday, November 19, 2006

Snow storm, power, and phones

This morning we woke up to a snow storm -- strong winds and lots of snow. It was the wet kind of snow. It looks like another 4 inches or so (perhaps more) fell since last night. The air is warming up again, and the snow has now stopped. We'll be seeing daytime temps above freezing for a couple more days before it goes down again later this week.

This mushy snow is actually worse to drive in than solidly frozen ice with snow on top, we've discovered. With the mush ice, ruts develop and the cars drift towards the ruts. At least with ice and cold snow, once you get moving and don't go too fast, the vehicle goes where its pointed.

We had a total of ten in church yesterday. One of the member's daughter whom we hadn't yet seen came with him yesterday. But other than her, it was the usual crowd. A few of us briefly discussed the possibility of starting a community children's choir. We'll inquire around to see what sort of interest there is around here. It's another idea to try to be of service to this community.

Yesterday evening we went over to the Herbrandsons and played a couple of games: Apples to Apples and Fictionary. Deloris is an American Girl fan, as are our children. So they brought over their dolls and some of the accessories and had fun looking through them. Gerry was particularly impressed by the engineering of the little bicycle.

We had a power outage this morning -- the second one that we know of after our arrival. When the power goes out, the whole town goes out. All the stores shut down. It took around 1.5 hours for the power to come back. Both cell phone systems were also taken out. So in this town, there is a very good reason for having landlines. Cell services cannot be relied upon during emergencies. One of the other pastors remarked that the cell phone isn't good for emergencies but it a good personal protection device in this town -- for using it to hit an assaulter on the head.

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