What A Storm

When your house sits at an elevation of 5200 feet, mother nature can be cruel!  Trees are all leafed out, clematis was about two feet tall, peonies plants were growing, columbine was growing like a weed–now it’s all buried beneath fifteen inches of snow!!!  Hopefully all the plants will rebound once the snow has melted.  We had just enough wind to knock the snow from the aspen so maybe the trees are not too damaged.Fifteen inches of snow is a lot and with Thursday being mostly cloudy and Friday’s temp reaching only 50 degrees, melting is rather slow!

Tuesday we were in Billings and it was a beautiful day–we looked at ATV side by sides, shopped at Costco, lost two pounds–of hair that is–and had a great lunch at Jake’s.   On the way home with me driving, the Cowboy located a CanAm side by side in Dillon, Montana–the only one of the model we wanted in the whole state of Montana!  Oh, no–not another drive–why couldn’t there have been an ATV at the Billings dealership???

So–why do we need another CanAm???  Well–we sold our yellow one in North Ranch before the move to Pearce. Logistics were just becoming too much–how to get a truck, jeep, motorhome, trailer and CanAm to our new home in Pearce–after all, there is only two of us.  We had lots of offers for help moving but it’s over 400 miles one way from North Ranch to Pearce–we didn’t want to impose on our friends–we like them! :)There is a ready made pool of ATV buyers in North Ranch–we parked the bright yellow CanAm in the front yard, posted a for sale sign and in two days it was gone.

Wednesday morning in the rain we headed west to Dillon.  Heading over the Bozeman pass the rain was mixed with snow and the roads were getting slushy.  It was a miserable trip over and an even more miserable trip back as we were getting late into the evening.  Not the greatest photo but the best I’ve got at this time–we like the more subdued color! 🙂

And as if the snow wasn’t bad enough–we lost power Wednesday night about 11pm and we didn’t have electricity until almost 10pm Thursday evening.  We do have a wood burning stove in our basement so we stayed warm but when you live in the country you need electricity to pump water into your home.  So–no water except what we collected from our cistern overflow.  Thursday I had a lunch date with Jill and Jeane plus we were to meet Sarge and Sarah in Livingston for an early dinner.  It’s a good thing Nat lives in town, has a shower and he had electricity!  We have two refrigerators–the Cowboy fired up our little Honda generator and we had extension cords running all over the house to those refrigerators.  He cleaned snow off the trailer solar panels and we used that power to charge our computers and to run the internet router.  We used our boondocking coffee percolator on the wood stove to make coffee.  It was an interesting 24 hours!

I spent the morning finishing a customer quilt and the Cowboy started customizing the CanAm to suit us. The snow is melting slowly, we are grateful for electricity and running water–life is good.