CHRISTMAS UPDATE OF WINTER STORM SAGA/FINANCIAL AND LIVING SITUATION
Nothing Short of a Christmas Miracle
We’re alive and our generator started working again this morning
Well, we made it through a historically epic and massive storm, Winter Storm Elliott. The official total where we are near Buffalo Airport in Cheektowaga, NY was 43" as of Sunday morning. The snow has subsided and so has the wind that has rocked us in our truck for much of this storm.
We are only expected to get another couple of inches or so in the next couple of days as the overall temperature stays around 21–25 degrees for the next two days. I’m definitely looking forward to the 50s on Friday-Monday next week or even the 40s to come on Thursday. It’s definitely about to warm up again and that favors us in such a huge way.
We will have a large window to clean up in our current yet old truck before we transfer everything into our RV (new home) next to us. The thing is, we couldn’t get our generator to generate power all day yesterday no matter how much we tried. We were only halfway through the storm and the tarp that we had to protect our expensive machinery from the storm has become weathered and the blizzard magnified and exemplified this fact.
Now that we spent all night last night sleeping and praying that we’d wake up alive, we woke up to a miracle. The batteries had only gotten down to about 38% from the 60% it had been when we were trying to get ourselves to full to stay completely safe in the storm. We waited until morning on Christmas since we woke up around 2 am. It would’ve been too cold, even if it was a bit warmer at that point, to go out there.
The wind chill when we woke up outside was finally above zero. It was one degree Fahrenheit. We waited until about 7 am and when the temperature and wind chill was a little higher but more importantly, it would be easier to see. Mike had to contend with opening the door and seeing it try to stick again. He went out there three times this morning shaking off the snow, literally slamming his fists into our machine, and just trying to get all of the snow away from our frame. He was as frustrated as I am that it wasn’t staying at first and that he had to keep going out in the bone-chilling cold.
He must’ve been successful slamming it vigorously because at about 7:30 this morning on Christmas, he got it to start running at the sound and frequency we were used to hearing. It’s been two hours since he started our generator and now we’re both inside safe and warm. The battery has gone from 29% at 7 am to about 53% here at 9:40 am. It still has a bit to go and with the math that I did in my head, the batteries should be charged at this rate around 2 pm or 3 pm today.
With a potentially full battery by midday and better weather ahead, we did the unthinkable and survived the storm despite not knowing if we were going to have to incur another cost and replace the current one with our replacement plan at Harbor Freight but still pay a 20% restocking fee.
We’re still mightily short on funds and we’re really trying to make it to when we get money again if we can’t get any more help on our GoFundMe fundraiser. All of the donations from the supporters and readers who have followed this saga have definitely helped.
Anyway, I digress. We are alive on Christmas and the appliances inside our truck didn’t drain our battery completely dead in freezing temperatures.
I’m super grateful and thankful for being able to update everyone after the scary circumstances yesterday. We truly are survivors and we made it. Not even an epic blizzard/winter storm event could take us out when there was a chance given everything that had happened. We’re going to continue to stay inside our truck today.
I can’t see as far as the store at the truck stop since the RV is blocking our view right now but I know that it wasn’t open yesterday since the power seemingly went out and there are still thousands of customers without power as of this morning. There’s a driving ban still in effect for Erie County just based on the sheer amount of snow still on the ground and the number of disabled vehicles out there. We can actually still see a few just outside of our door on the normally busy Walden Avenue in front of one of the busiest malls in the entire country at Walden Galleria.
There are reports of hundreds of stranded motorists and that there was no availability of emergency services because the weather was so bad. I had read a report of a mom and a 2-year-old dying in their car already. I hope that there aren’t many more sad stories like this that we’ll hear from the aftereffects of this massive storm and that many people will also experience miracles.
It is Christmas, after all. Miracles can and do happen. And the generosity, helpfulness, and kindness of others can really shine through in a time like this. I’m just hoping that many others still out there got as lucky or were as prepared in this case as we had been. Thank goodness for Mike and thank goodness for our sheer dumb luck in this storm and with our batteries and generator. I want to wish everyone a great holiday and again thank you all for the outpouring of support.
