Encased in ice!

Thursday
We woke (a little late) this morning to find everything covered in a thin coating of ice. It was still raining, and I assumed it would start melting soon, so I quickly put some shoes on and headed into the garden. I didn’t want to venture far, as I didn’t want to slip, but fortunately this shrub is close to the front door, and I thought looked very pretty with its tiny leaves. I discovered from my phone, that many of the school districts were on a 2-hour delay, and our local school district had three of its buildings without power. When we ventured out to the “Y” for a swim early afternoon, I met one of my swimming “buddies” who’s quite often there at the same time, and she told me they’d been without heat at home since 4 am, and the house was getting rather cool. The problem is since many trees still have some leaves on, branches or whole trees fall under the weight of the ice, often falling onto the cables. We saw quite a number of damaged trees as we were driving there. We felt very fortunate that we maintained our power! Then, as we were driving home it began to snow! Since we will be away for the next two weekends, we had decided we would go to bells, to practice for our next performance in December, but we would skip choir practice, since I didn’t think he would be practicing much beyond two weeks. However, when we pulled up at church, we could see into the bell room and see that Debbie was putting the tables away! Apparently she had called everyone to cancel, but she had assumed we wouldn’t be there, so hadn’t called us - she was most apologetic!
I have put in a couple of extras, a general shot of the hedge and trees at the bottom of the garden, and a cardinal perched on the icy hedge!
Thankful for a warm house
Thankful today for electricity workers out in cold wet conditions restoring power to people’s homes
Thankful for a morning phone call from Laura