Girl's Weekend 2012 started out like any other, with all of us heading up the mountain at various times on Thursday. I was the last to start out, and with winter weather looming, I was anxious to get there before the weather started. I loaded the dogs in a crate and packed food, clothing, and wine for a weekend, and headed up. For the last 15 miles or so while still daylight, I drove in very wet snow. I arrived, got unloaded and walked the dogs without any thought of what might be coming our way. Thursday was rather calm, Lisa made some lavash pizzas and we had some wine. I was exhausted from the day and the dogs and i turned in early around 10pm.
Friday morning, I got up, got dressed, put their jackets on and opened the door to walk the dogs. Much to my surprise, about 6" of snow had fallen overnight. The trees were covered, the road was covered and our vehicles were all covered. It was a very good thing that I had put the dogs' jackets on as the snow was so deep that they could not "walk", they had to hop. They really didn't know what to think, but they were having a blast. I made a cute video of them romping in the snow.
Friday, after an amazing breakfast of poached eggs on english muffins with bangers and bacon, we hung out and played games. I was feeling under the weather with a horrible cough so I wasn't really in the heavy drinking mood. I tried scotch and wine and scotch seemed to feel the best, so I sipped. I made chicken enchiladas for dinner with green chile chicken that I had cooked all day in the crock pot. It was a delicious dinner. We watched some movies and again, I was ready to call it a night early. The dogs and I headed off to bed.
Saturday morning started out uneventful. However, that all changed at 9am when the power went off. We had gotten another 6" of snow overnight, and the snow continued to come down Saturday morning. We reported the power outage to APS and eventually received an estimated restore time of 12 Noon. Ha!
12 Noon came and went, and still no power. We missed the opportunity to make breakfast and now had to be creative. Our plans were to make a sausage, broccoli and cheese quiche' in homemade pie crust. Judy rolled out the pie crust and our creativity had to take over. Fortunately, the grill at the cabin has a side burner, so I was able to brown the sausage. I "baked" the pie shell in the pie dish on the grill. I also put broccoli in tin foil on the grill to cook it. Once the broccoli was cooked and the pie crust was baked, I put scrambled eggs, sausage and broccoli in a pan on the side burner of the grill. When the eggs were cooked, I poured everything in the pre-baked pie dish, put some cheese on top and put it back on the grill. It was the most delicious quiche' we had ever had!! It was amazing!
Lisa called APS early afternoon and there was now no estimated time that the power was coming back on. Survival mode kicked in, and after having started a fire early in the day to keep warm, discovered we might not have enough wood to last the night. We also recognized the need to go back out and shovel some more snow (we had shoved the 'birm' caused by snow plow from in front of the cars on Friday) because the birm was back and deeper than ever. We saw a neighbor with his snow plow out there, so we asked him to plow the birm. He did an amazing job, and we had to do minimal shoveling to clear a path to the street and be able to get the cars out the next day. We also had to go to a neighbor's house to retrieve wood from their garage that was dry. Once all of our hard labor was done, it started getting dark. We settled into the cabin to relax and Lisa started pulling out candles to provide light. She must have pulled out 2 dozen candles, lit them, and placed them appropriately around the cabin. She then sat down to relax. Within 5 minutes, the power came on! By now it was 6pm and we were all cold and ready for the power to be on!
The rest of Saturday was spent making potatoes on the electric stove and steaks on the grill. Dinner was delicious! After dinner, we watched some movies and drank some wine. It was a very relaxing night and a nice end to the day. Again, I was in bed by 10pm with the dogs!
Today, our efforts of yesterday paid off. The vehicles were easy to get out and we got everything packed up. We shut off the water and winterized the cabin, and we all headed down the hill. It was truly an amazing weekend. We ate well, drank moderately, and had to practice our survival skills and learn to get things done without electricity. We dealt with over 18" of snow that came down in a 48 hour period of time, and had a great time!
My girls hold a special place in my heart. I will always treasure these weekends. This time, we all learned something about ourselves - WE ARE SURVIVORS! Lots of love to all of my girls!
