Farewell, FDR!

I recently posted about our rural electric co-op, and how they are getting ready to replace some of the power lines and transformers in our area. They're now almost finished, and I'm surprised they've been able to do it without shutting our power off for more than a couple of hours at a time.

The chief manager with the project told us that the infrastructure they're replacing dates to the 1940s! He's fairly confident that it went up as part of a New Deal era rural electrification, and that our section of the county did not have electricity before that.

We've been quite fortunate that the last few winters have been so mild. With lines and poles this old, one more bad ice storm could've taken down quite a bit of our local grid. (Global warming alarmists, take note! There are benefits to rising temperatures!) Anyway, nice that we'll have one less thing to worry about this winter.

Note the well-established grape vines at the bottom of the picture. This is the first vineyard we planted, the first spring we were here (2002). This is not the one the lambs recently decimated.