An awful ice storm with accumulation of more than 2″ hit KY on Jan 27th.  Trees, limbs, electric towers and poles, electric lines, etc. were all dragged down by the excess weight of the ice.  Electricity was lost almost everywhere for at least a few hours.  Granny fared the best, only losing electric for about four hours.  The kids talked about going outside and listening to transformers explode along the street at 3 AM as the electicity went out.  Matt and Angela had electric back pretty quickly but Vanessa and Al were out for four or five days.  John and Diane didn’t get electric until about the 4th or 5th.  It’s now Feb 11 and Vic and Glenn still don’t have any and don’t have an idea when they will.  Here in Paris we had just a little ice but almost all rain.  Fifteen miles north of us was one of the worst hit areas.  I guess we were just lucky.  Stores in Paris sold out of bread, water, batteries, chain saws, generators, etc. really quickly.  We decided to go to KY on Jan 31st to help as best we could.   Our first stop was in Hodgenville to pick up Ben and Sam.  Vic’s family was staying at Glenn’s Mom’s house (no electric until around Feb 8th) and the boys needed a change of scenery.  We took them to Granny’s house.  Vanessa, Al, John, Diane and Eric met us there.  The menfolk cleaned up downed branches outside while the womenfolk babysat.  We had a good afternoon playing with the boys.  Vic had told us to bring them back fed, awake but worn out, and after dark.  We got them worn out with no problem and stopped at McDonald’s on the way back to Hodgenville to get them a little to eat.  I ran inside while Neil was supposed to keep them awake in the truck.  By the time I got back to the truck, Ben had passed out and we couldn’t wake him up no matter what.  Poor little thing.  Sam lasted another five minutes before he fell asleep drinking a milk shake.  We did get them back after dark so we managed to accomplish two thirds of our mission.  The next day, we went to John and Diane’s house to see the damage there.  Their yard was a huge mess with limbs everywhere.  It was going to take them a long time to get it back to normal.  After that, we drove out to help Glenn and Mark (his brother) clean limbs and trees of their fenceline.  Glenn was afraid the calves would escape.  Luckily, it had warmed up and most of the ice had melted by then.  On the other hand, the ground was total mush and really cow poopy.  I told Glenn that he was lucky I’d grown up on a farm because every other steep put you in slimy cow poop.  If I was a high maintenance city girl, I would have been out of there in less than two minutes.  Anyway, we worked our way around the fence and got it all back in working order.  All Glenn needed were a few fence posts to have it cow escape proof.  When we got back to Granny’s we ordered pizza and watched the Super Bowl with John and Diane.  That was a really good game but I thought the commercials weren’t all that hot this year.  The next morning we packed up the stuff in Vic’s freezer and transferred it to Granny’s freezer.  Another day, and they would have lost a bunch of food.  Since no one else needed our help after that, we decided to head back to Paris.  We enjoyed seeing everyone but wish the circumstances could have been a little better.  It’ll be a long time before everyone is recovered from that storm.

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