Ice storm of 2007

You watch the weather. Winter storm advisory. How many times have you heard it and said “yeah, yeah – no big deal”. I went to work on Monday, Dec. 10, after being down in Florida since Nov. 28. It’s always hard to get back in gear after being away for so long, isn’t it? By early afternoon, we were hearing about plans for closing campus and re-scheduling finals because of the ice storm headed our way. Listen to the 6am news, they said. I admitted that I wouldn’t be crushed if campus shut down on Tuesday. I could use another day off!

I woke up to the 6am news and didn’t hear a thing about K-State shutting down. I got up, made myself a cup of hot tea, and sat down to watch the Topeka news. That’s when I finally heard the announcement. We were closed. Power was out in various parts of town. 15,000 in the county. Roads were treacherous.

My power was still on. The lights flickered once on Tuesday morning as freezing rain continued to fall.

On heat…

I failed to mention in my post a couple of weeks back that when I returned from sunny Florida to cold Kansas, it wasn’t just  cold (30 degrees) outside.  The furnace in my house died, or rather, the igniter switch died.  The house was 54 degrees. Surprisingly, the cat was still talking to me.   Since I arrived home around 7:30pm, I decided to wait until Saturday morning to call the furnace folks.  Of course, by that time, freezing rain was falling. I don’t think the repairman was too happy.  But, the heater was fixed and within a few hours, the temp inside climbed to 69.