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 Post by Manny

NO SCHOOL

I did not lose power for this whole time believe it or not, even though we had a massacre snowstorm which took out a lot of people’s power in my neighborhood. I did lose Internet for three days straight.

On Saturday morning I was at my sister’s friend, Lauren’s, Bat mitzvah. The morning ceremony was the  initiation, and was being held at The Woodstock Jewish Congregation. My family and I read prayers from the Torah and Prayer Book. It was a very special time for Lauren and her parents cried.

After that my family and I along with the rest of the group, went in to a separate part of the building and ate. They served bagels and salad. There was also an after party at a restaurant called Terrapin. It was really fun because there was food (also bagels), and a bar at which was all free! I ordered about 10 sodas. Later there was dance party and dinner. For dinner there was this weird food that I don’t know the name of it. IT WAS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The next day, Sunday, I just played in the snow and had a giant snowball fight with my dog! I won because I pegged him right in the face but then he bit me really hard. After that I went inside with Russell, my dog, covered in snow! When I say covered I mean COVERED!!! Russell had snow all over him and it almost looked like he was a white dog!! He shook it all off on me! Then my mom came and took the dog and gave him a hot bath…. She gave me hot chocolate and put mini marshmallows in it just the way I like it. I lost Internet so I couldn’t do my homework but at least my family still had hot water and heat. I really like power outages because me and my sister play flashlight tag in the dark and it is SO much fun!!!!! Unfortunately, we didn’t lose power. I tried to sled outside but even though we got a foot of snow and the snow was too thin once something was on it. My Internet came back on at about 6:00 P.M. so I could do my homework.

On Monday IT WAS HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!!!!! I spent the whole day up until 5 pm carving pumpkins, eating candy, and preparing for Halloween. My dad showed me this funny video called Fire Marshal Bill. At 5 pm my two friends, Owen and Jason came over and we went out to get candy. We had a lot of fun when there were houses that had a bucket full of candy outside their house…….. I got a lot of candy!!!!!! That night I watched TV and ate some of my candy.

No School by Massimo

No School

When I had no school for five days straight (counting the weekend), I had a lot of fun. I had no Internet for most of the time and I was sick during it so I didn’t do much, but it gave me a lot of rest so that was a good thing. I got 18’’ of snow at my house so we could play a lot outside with my cousin who came over.On Saturday, when my mom, my sister and I came back from a party, we tried to get up the hill to our house. My mom was afraid to go up the hill because she saw other people slipping every which way. She decided that she would not drive up, so she called my dad to take us up and leave her car at the bottom of the hill. Finally my dad got to the bottom of the hill ( which felt like hours I might add). When we got to my house I ran to my room and went to bed.

When I woke up, we all went sledding at a friends. It was fun sledding but we had to walk there and it was really cold.  We were walking up two small hills to get to our friend’s house while carrying sleds with snow pants on ( which were not light at all). When we got at the house we had to walk up this really really long and steep driveway. That was where we were sledding,  so we went down and up down and up down and up.

After that it was Monday,  Halloween and I was still sick, so I  just rested  on the sofa the whole time. When it was almost time to go trick-or-treating I didn’t feel much better so I thought that I wouldn’t go, but later on I decided to go. I was really glad I did because a friend was coming with us so that was cool. When we got back, our friend left and I heard from my mom that there was no school the next day, so I stayed up for a long time.