Snow Storm and Power Outage by Lizzy

Snow Storm

This weekend was quite an unusual one for October. First of all, snow in October!! Strange. Well I had a pretty tough weekend. When my family and I woke up my brother told us it was supposed to snow. Of course it was hard to believe at first but my dad still went out to get our snow plow ready. Before we knew it it was snowing like CRAZY!! I had a ballet rehearsal scheduled for 4:00 on Saturday. We had been nervously checking the website trying to see if my ballet teacher cancelled because missing rehearsal is never good. We decided that we wouldn’t go because the weather was too bad and the roads too dangerous to drive on.  Luckily, we found out that it was cancelled but only after we should’ve left so we made a good decision.

At one point my dad went out to get food and of course while he was gone the power went out. The power was out from about Saturday afternoon to Tuesday morning. Luckily, we have a generator. We had it on for short periods of time to keep ourselves warm, get on the internet, cook meals and keep our food cold. In some ways it was difficult but it was also fun. A positive about this long weekend was that I had a lot of fun with my family. Every night we sat together by the fire and roasted marshmallows. They were delicious and I hadn’t had any in awhile.

Another positive was that I realized how much electricity does for us. I realized how grateful I should be to have power. Without it I would be cold in the winter and hot in the summer, I wouldn’t be able to get on the internet, I wouldn’t have TV and I wouldn’t be able to have light other than lights that run on batteries or candles. I would have to wash all my clothes and myself in a stream or a natural source of water, use fire to cook my food and basically do everything by hand. There are a lot of people in the world who live this way and I realize how fortunate I am to have this luxury. Thank you Thomas Edison.

The night the power went out we saw several Central Hudson trucks coming down our road. The power came on for about a minute and then went off after they left. My dad kept testing to see if the electricity was on but it never was until they called us Tuesday morning and told us to check. After that we were fine! I think I was very lucky this weekend to have any power at all.

Something really exciting about my long weekend was that it was Halloween! For Halloween I went trick or treating in New Paltz with family friends. I barely got any candy but the candy I got was delicious! It’s really fun going in New Paltz for two reasons. One, there is a Halloween parade and sometimes you see really great costumes! Two, it’s really fun going through town because a lot of stores have candy and also there are a lot of college apartments and condos. For Halloween I was a deer. I didn’t have any costume planned and that was the only one I could find in my house.

Blogging Challenge Week – Holiday by Remy

This weekend was a disaster. Global warming is contributing to this very strange weather, so please help and make a difference. This weekend there was nine inches of snow at my house. Since this is so early for snow the trees still had all their leaves on. The snow stuck to the leaves and broke the branches off. The snow was just so heavy that lots of branches in my yard broke clean off. This has not happened in such an extreme before that I can even remember. During the weekend while it was still snowing about every second I heard crack!!!!! sssssssssssssssshhhhhhhh!!! That was the sound of a branch breaking off and then all of the snow that was on it, pouring off. This kept on going for the whole time it was snowing and some time after the snow stopped. We got about nine inches of snow but other places near me got almost two feet!!! I think that the people who got almost two feet must have had a lot of trees down not just branches. From doing some research and analysis my family figured out that our power went out on Saturday afternoon at 4pm because of a branch falling on a wire on our road which broke the fuse. Central Hudson came and fixed it by 7pm that night. We were all happy but then ten minuets after it came back on it went out and then a second later came back on. Then fifty minuets later it went out again and did not come back on until Monday afternoon.

The power went out the second time because a big power station or a transfer station broke down so we and a lot of other people lost power from that. Though it sounds like it would be easy to just fix the station and then have lots of people with power it is more complicated than that. It is not that simple and it takes a whole crew of people a long time to fix one of these stations.

Having the power back right before Halloween was perfect. Since the power came back in the afternoon we were able to dress up and actually see each other and do many other things too. It worked out perfectly. Halloween would have sucked without power. I went trick or treating with Cory. We had fun ding dong ditching people. One time we tapped on somebody’s window which was right next to the couch were a guy was sitting. After we tapped on the window we ran away. There was some slippery snow on this guys yard which I noticed. Cory didn’t, so the guy who was sitting on the couch came out of the house and started yelling at Cory who was lying on the ground because he had slipped and fell. Meanwhile I had gotten clean away and was at the next house. Later on that night the same thing happened but Cory got away and I was stuck so it evened its self out.

Cory and I got a lot of candy on Halloween but unfortunately I am allergic to candy so I gave all of mine to Cory and he really liked that. For Halloween I was a bank robber who had been grazed by a bullet. Cory was a very weird clown with a mask and had a cut down his arm. My sister went to theater camp so she knows how to make fake blood and all of those cool effect things that they do in the movies. She used her skills to make our cuts look very realistic.
Halloween was really exiting this year and I had a lot of fun trick or treating (though it would have been really funny if Cory had been a panda).

It was hard doing anything in our house when we did not have power. It is sad that we are so reliant on power because if it goes out for a long time then people could get injured, sick etc. This snow storm reminded me that we are very fortunate to have power. Just thinking about that made me think even harder about how it’s not just power that we have and others don’t. It is so much more. This power outage did a lot to my family. My parents are trying there hardest to conserve energy as mush as possible. Now I see so much more that others don’t have that we do so I think that PDS or I should do something to help people in foreign countries who do not have as much as us.

Some people have already gone to the hospital and others have died from the power outage. Some people died because they had their generators inside their houses so they got carbon monoxide poisoning.

While we did not have power we went to libraries and cafes so that we could charge our phones and computers and also do work because these places had WI-FI. While we were at these different places I did all the homework plus all the work I had to do to catch up for the days I missed.

After we got power back I ran around the house and screamed to the whole neighborhood that I had power. Unfortunately PDS does not have power so we can not go to school which I’m sad about. I’m also kind of happy that we don’t have school so I can organize my room do some projects for my own amusement and have all this done before I have to go to school.

On Tuesday when the high school had no school my sister was home, my mom and I were outside cleaning up branches in the yard. This was when our little in house power outage happened.

My sister was in her room Skyping with here friends when all of the sudden her lights went out and everything turned off in her room. She almost had a heart attack because she had thought that the power had gone out again. Then she went to the bathroom to check if the power was really out and the light in the bathroom did not work either. She went to my room and checked the light and it worked. She came outside and asked my mom and I what went wrong and told us the whole story. My mom asked my sister what she had plugged in and my sister replied a hair dryer and a space heater. My mom knew that both of those things used a lot of power so she told my sister that she must have flipped the circuit breaker. My mom went to the basement and fixed it and the power in my sister’s room and the upstairs bathroom was restored. A circuit breaker is a thing that flips off the power when the circuit for one or two rooms gets a big serge of power or is overloaded. When my sister finished telling me this story I cracked up!!!

Even though my yard looks like a disaster this weekend was really fun since I got to play lots of games instead of doing homework when the power was out which was a nice excuse. The story that my sister told me about the circuit breaker made my weekend one of the best ever!!!

No School!!!!! by Erik

For three straight days now I have had no school!  Why?  Because of a little snow storm that knocked down a tree on to some cables so now our school has no power, for now.  What have I been doing you may ask so let me tell you about what I did.
On Sunday, the day of the snow storm, I was supposed to have a football game but it got “snowed out.”  It would have been our first playoff game.  We were going to play White Plains who beat us 31-0 two weeks ago. We lost power that day too at about 7:00pm.  Luckily we have a huge generator that can heat my entire house and give us electricity so we could watch t.v or cook dinner.  The bad part was that our generator had a problem so my dad and I went out to fix it.  It took an hour to fix but it was fun.  The only thing I had to do was shine a flash light on the generator so my dad could fix it.
On Monday I didn’t do anything all day.  I just did my usual stuff like play outside, video games, skype friends and etc.  This year I wasn’t prepared for Halloween so I didn’t go trick or treating.  I was going to be a turtle but I didn’t find anything to use for the shell.
On Tuesday, I invited my friends Charlie and Clay to come over to my house (they both go to my school).  We played outside and ate donuts all day long and had lots of fun.  We also played with Nerf guns.  It was Charlie and me vs. Clay.  I didn’t realize how good Clay was at Nerf because he beat us.  He was hiding in my bushes and using a rifle all the time.  Charlie and I tried sneaking up behind him but he was everywhere!  It was super fun.
On Wednesday, even if there was school I would have missed the first half of the day because I had an Orthodontist appointment.  It was just a check up though.  My teeth really hurt afterwards because they tightened my braces.
It was very fun and exciting at first to have no school, but then it got very boring after a couple of days.  This experience made me think about how much we need technology.