Off-Grid in West Virginia

Sunday

Linda

The weather here has been so dry that the creeks barely have a sip of water left in them. We have had a few thunderstorms in the past weeks, but the clouds hardly let out a spit of rain and it wasn’t enough to wet the dust down. Most of the rain from the storms bypassed us, veering either North or South of us by a few mere miles.  Friday night was a different story.   We knew rain was in the forecast but not the storm we got. John and Carol were over visiting and at about 8:30 it started to rain with some rumbles and lightening in the distance.  Shortly after they left our weather alert radio went off warning that severe thunderstorms and possible high winds of seventy miles an hour were headed toward our county.

We got a little worried about John and Carol.  Large limbs or trees could fall across the roads. It happens all the time.  Thank goodness they made it home without any mishaps.     Sonny and I quickly put up the porch chairs and a few things that could go flying in a heavy wind. We stood on the porch as the rain came down in sheets and then the roar of the wind came up the backside of the mountain.  It blew across the tops of the trees and swirled down into the meadow. Lightening flashed across the sky and thunder boomed. I think we must have been on the edge of the higher winds. As quickly as the storm came in it moved on, but the rain stayed behind and gave us a good dousing. The ground and plants greedily soaked it up and by the next afternoon the creeks had subsided. Today, our creek is completely dry again.  The wind blew down a few limbs but nothing major and the yard is littered with dry leaves. The PV array even held up to the high winds. The summer has been so dry that the leaves will not sport the firey colors of Autumn this year.  Maybe next year.

Despite all that we were able to get some more wood stacked into the woodshed. We took the chain saw and cut up some of the trees that had previously blown across the road. The state or local nieghbors usually just cut them enough to clear the roadway and they lay along the side. It’s good seasoned wood so we thought we would take advantage of it. We have a lot of trees on our own property that need to come down but that wood will not be seasoned enough for use in the wood stove this year.

Hopefully we will soon get the wood stove installed. Sonny called a local company two weeks ago to to come out and give us an estimate on putting in the triple wall pipe for the wood stove chimney. Of course no one showed up the first and second appointments that were set up. Sonny set up a third appointment for last Monday and someone actually showed up. The guy took the measurements and told me he would call with the estimate that night. He also said he could come out this Monday and do the job. Sonny has called the company numerous times this past week to see what happened with our estimate. I’ll let him explain that little frustration. C’est la vie.

On another note. I got these plates at the local Flea market Saturday for .50 cents a piece. I thought they were really pretty.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy, Homesteading, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.