I have a few ice storm stories. First, let me tell you a couple of things. I live in Buxton and I was without power for 11 days.

I recall the first morning with all the ice falling off the trees, glittering in the sun. It was so pretty. I had no idea what was in store. The first thing I did was go buy a generator. Unfortunately, I paid too much (not that unusual under the circumstances) and bought a generator that was way too small to run much beyond a couple of lights. Well, it would run the kerosene heater so I would have the generator running outside to power the heater inside. Talk about leaving a carbon footprint.

My wife and kids went to stay with her mom in Westbrook who never lost power. I stayed at the house to keep a fire going so the pipes didn't freeze. At first, it wasn't so bad. Sort of like camping, only indoors. Then a couple of days turned into 4 days. Then 5 days. Everyone almost everywhere had power. I started making up excuses to visit people so that I could take a shower. "Hey, I'm going to return that screwdriver I borrowed from you. Mind if I take a shower?"

It is interesting the things you figure out. I had a freezer full of food and the freezer was in my breezeway. So I would open the door to the freezer and leave it open all night and then close it during the day and that prevented the food from thawing. I learned that water is never an issue in the winter as the house was surrounded by water in the form of snow. Just grab a bucket full, toss it on the gas or wood stove and there's water for flushing the toilet. Didn't work so hot for cooking but I found that I could substitute beer in almost anything but coffee. Beef stew, chili, I came up with a few. And grilling outdoors in the winter is now perfectly normal.

One thing that made my plight unique was that at that point in time, I was a self employed computer consultant. Once a month or so, I'd fly somewhere and do a job. The rest of my time, I stayed home and worked from there. So while most people could go to work, get warm, commiserate with their colleagues and have some sense of normalcy, I had no where to go. With no power, I could not work. All I could do is sit around, keep the fire going and drink beer. After we got to a week, I was kind of discouraged.

When the lights came on in the houses around me but ours didn't, I was despondent. Our issue was a wire that served only my neighbor's house and mine and as I am sure we all recall, those are the ones that got fixed at the very end. It seemed like the power would never come back on and I was destined to live my life as a shivering drunk when lo and behold, there was the CMP truck in my yard. I couldn't have been happier if I had seen the second coming of Christ.

And one final anecdote. For tax reasons, we did not bill our customers in December because we wanted to collect the money in the same year as we billed the customer. So the first week of January was always a big billing period. Our insurance company said they would compensate us for lost business based on what we had traditionally billed during that period. The long and the short of it is that I made $500 a day for 11 days for sitting around, shivering and drinking beer. Once I learned that, I wish it had been out for a little while longer!

Mat Poland

NORTH GORHAM

I was working on a novel that year and had moved to a charming cottage on the banks of the Presumpscot River. The place was not entirely isolated, but was set back from the road so I saw no one except the owners who lived several hundred yards away, and no one saw me: perfect for writing, but not so perfect in an ice storm, especially since the owners were vacationing in Florida, and I had been charged with "keeping an eye on things."

When the storm hit, I didn't panic. I'd been through storms before and knew what to do. Start with the basics: build a fire. But...