Sally's GF3 thread

[Sally PB]

Thanks, @aart and @U_Stormcrow for your thoughts and good wishes.We're hanging in there!

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Glad you pulled thru OK. I'm headed off to check radar, see what's brewing in the eastern gulf, then I really need a shower before work.

 

[Sally PB]

We made the news with our wind gusts. one of the local channels has some pretty neat weather prediction equipment/software/visuals. They have the ability to zoom in down to street level, and had images of our road. Not photo, but color gradients showing the windspeed in the area, overlaid on the road map. Pretty cool technology.

There was a possible tornado about 40 miles northeast. Their wind tracker could show a sudden change, and they explained that it was a debris field, indicating rotation. It disipated quickly, and then became straight line winds.

When DirecTV or Dish Network has had a tiff with this channel, and was not carrying it, and we've had to watch something else, it is very evident that these people are much better at the prediction/explanation stuff.

Their chief meteorologist, Ellen Bacca, is pregnant, and she looks like she's about to pop. Any day now...

 

[Sally PB]

Lots of trees snapped off like this. If that tree had broken at ground level, it would have been on the car. Whew.

 

[Iluveggers]

Wow @Sally PB so glad you and your belongings are ok (minus the TV).

 

[Sally PB]

@Iluveggers, thank you!

 

[Sally PB]

Welllll.... Restoration time was supposed to be 3:45 this afternoon. Now it's pushed out to 6 am tomorrow. Sigh. I really hope they're right. It would be nice to have the power back on in time for breakfast.

You can hear the generator's sound change when you turn on the stove. No way I'll be canning tomatoes by gennie power. I have some that need to be done, too. I gave some of them to the chickens today.

No way I'm going to bake bread by gennie, either. DH is just about out of Betsy Bread. So named because the recipe came from our neighbor. It's made in a bread machine, and dangitall! makes me really wish my body could handle gluten.

Speaking of making bread in a bread machine... It took me about 4 loaves to get the recipe dialed in to my ingredients and my machine. Those 4 loaves were not wasted, but they weren't as good as what I make now.

I had no idea that there was such a difference between, say, bread flour and all purpose flour. I had to scale the size down a bit too, as the loaf rose high enough to hit the lid and the top inch wasn't baked all the way through.

But the one substitution that really surprised me was using sea salt versus regular table salt. They are NOT interchangable for baking. Sea salt is... denser? saltier? something that table salt is not. Since salt can inhibit yeast, the resulting loaf was short, dense, and hadn't filled up the pan. Hubby said it tasted weird too. I was out of table salt (how do you run out of table salt??) and subbed sea salt, measure for measure, and the result was not quite a disaster.

I believe that qualifies as "damned by faint praise."

 

[aart]

You can hear the generator's sound change when you turn on the stove. No way I'll be canning tomatoes by gennie power. I have some that need to be done, too.

Fire up the wood stove?

 

[Sally PB]

Fire up the wood stove?

It takes a fairly long time to boil water in a saucepan on the woodstove. It would take all day with that thing to can tomatoes, and the house would be about 100 degrees.

We and canned 7 quarts of tomatoes by generator power. The freezer and fridge benefited from having the power on for several hours. The freezer is doing fine. The stuff in the fridge is hanging in there.

Our updated restoration time is midnight tonight. We'll see. When I went to get gas, I saw a home with a power pole snapped in their front yard. I also saw several large pine trees down, hung up on lines, in another place.

The TV converter box that DH ordered IS going to get here before the power is on! It's about 10 miles away right now.

 

[Sally PB]

Our neighbor had a split maple tree come down. It fell next to their house, missed their car. We went over and spent a couple hours helping them cut it up and haul away the debris. Got my steps in today, that's for sure! I also got another trailer load of branches to chip up and put on the garden.

Another neighbor, the "new kids on the street," have a Generac that automatically comes on, so they haven't had to deal with having no electricity. We saw them when we took Freya for a walk, and asked about how much propane that thing burns? About $80/day in propane.