I agree, I love to see the trees glisten with ice when we lived in Atlanta or on trips to mountains. Beautiful!
Whining about the weather just shows we did not prepare. ie the right clothes, enough wood or youth. So many actually enjoy the winter. I no longer have my ice skates, toboggan or snow saucer but when I had them, I was out in it.
Today, local news is calling our weather in Henderson/Vegas "gorgeous", but wife and I only think of it as "so, so". I know I've said this a few times in this forum, but...............we sure are glad that we didn't get rid of any of our winter clothes from living in Colorado. IOW, Reno area is 33 degrees as I write this, and that is fine with us. Much better than 110 in summer months!
78°F and drizzling rain. Supposed to drop to freezing overnight. This will be our first freeze of the winter.
I'm not sure what you mean by "equipped to handle ice." The DPS has trucks that put sand or salt (whatever) on overpasses but that's about it. Lows in the 30's rarely cause much ice since it will warm up during the day. It's rare for us to have more than a week of freezing weather at a time.
Sure...and I was the same way when we lived in Indiana. But I was 9 years old. A kid looks at a snow forecast hoping that it does happen. I doubt that the adults had the same perspective. If they didn't prepare, I had no idea. And in the Midwest, these storms are routine, not twice-in-a-decade events. You make a good suggestion to stack the wood high & deep. I'll pass it along to all my friends who have heat pumps.
"Ice, Ice, Baby"! I can't get that stupid song out of my head. We have freezing rain this morning with a temperure of 29 degrees and wind chill of 18. This afternoon a wintry mix is moving in and then snow by evening. As the day goes on, the winds are supposed to pick up and be gusty. "Oh the weather ouside is frightful, but the fire it's so delightful"
I try to encourage everyone who lives in an area where the temperature can low enough to endanger your life to have a heat source large enough to heat at least one room without input from outside their property for at least a few days.
I used to have a kerosene heater in my 600 ft² home in northern Virginia. It was safe because the place was so drafty, so I knew I was getting a natural air exchange through it. The problem was that the heater was 11,000 BTUs, so it never got below 80° when I had it on. I only used it for the coldest of nights when my floor furnace could not keep up. But that's actually good advice, Don. My neighbors have electric baseboard heat and when the power goes out, they bundle up inside. I'm not sure what they might get. Kerosene works, but it smells awful. There's always some that splashes on the heater. Maybe propane,since you can store it long-term.
Propane can be the best if you don't have the ability to install a wood stove. Propane is stable forever, and many of the stoves are now certified for indoor use without a flue...although I would still recommend a good battery-operated CO detector. There are tiny wall-mounted wood stoves as well, but a flue is needed. I considered buying a little wall-mounted wood stove of one of my outbuildings that had been developed for Canadian fishing boats, but I can no longer find that, so it may no longer sold.
We had about 30 minutes of light snow and sleet while ago, but I was in the shower and missed it. Dang! I don't even have my bread and milk, either!