Pretty snow! We usually have some here by this time, too, but the weather has been weird this autumn... Unseasonably warm, though the past couple of nights have been down around -7C.

How deep is your well? If it is less than 20' or so (I guess 6 or 7 m, right?), there are some inexpensive pitcher pumps that will pump that far. What people around here do to keep them from freezing in winter is to put a foot valve on the bottom, and then drill a small hole in the pipe down below the frost line. Then the foot valve keeps the water level as high as possible without freezing, so that it is easier to prime the pump, but when the pump is not in use the water gradually leaks out of the little hole until it is down below the frost line. Would that work for you, or would it still freeze before leaking down below the frost line?

Our electrical grid here is pretty bad, lol. A couple of years ago, the wind blew something down and took out power for half of the state. Then they tried to back-feed it through some sub station somewhere, and blew up the substation. So we were without power for 8 days. It was the hottest part of summer, so some friends and I retreated to a dugout cabin back in the woods and hung out there drinking and riding dirt bikes until the power came back on, heh.

My most interesting time was back in 1985, though. Let's see, I guess I would have been 7 or 8 years old then. I grew up in a narrow valley, with only one road in and no other way out (at the time). A hurricane came through, and there was massive flooding all over the place. This area was one of the hardest hit by it. Anyway, it washed out both of the bridges on that road, so we were stuck down in there for about 6 months with no electricity or telephones. We are all farmers, so we grew gardens and had cattle and there was plenty of food, so we were fairly comfortable, but it was still an interesting time. I missed a lot of school, which was great, haha.

We had a dairy operation at the time, probably 300 head of milk cows, and there was a 2000 gallon holding tank that the milk was stored in until the truck could come pick it up. There was a backup generator on that tank to keep the milk cold when the power was out. Of course, all of that was washed out and ruined, but I remember helping my father fish that generator out of the stones and mud with a tractor, and then we tore it completely apart, re-wound the windings by hand and re-packed all of the bearings with grease, and got it going again. It was big enough to power the whole house, but we shared it around between the other houses down in there, so we only had power once each week. So we had just bought one of those "new fangled" VCRs, and had one tape for it. So every Wednesday I watched "Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn" several times. By the time we ran out of diesel fuel, I had the whole movie memorized, but by that time we had used up all of the perishable foods, so it wasn't a problem.

Many of the menfolk at the time chewed tobacco, too. My grandfather had a large stash of it in his basement, and the stash became the subject of secret night-time raids, and changed hands every night. But during the daytime, nobody talked about it and worked together to keep things going. But the chewing tobacco became kind of a currency, lol.

In general we had plenty of food, and all got along fine, until the National Guard started dropping crates of random donated food (which we didn't actually need) from helicopters. The thing is though, we had been eating pretty much the same thing every day, so the variety was something I guess we hadn't realized we'd missed until those crates were dropped. And then the social order broke down, as people argued over how to divide up the new stuff. I remember my mother and my aunt getting into a rolling-in-the-dirt fist fight over a 2 liter bottle of crappy hawaiian punch, lol.

Anyway, a short time later the state finally got around to putting in some temporary bridges, and the interesting time was over. But we had to have new topsoil trucked in from out of state to put on the fields, and we are still picking out the river rocks even today. If I had been older, it probably would have been a bad experience, but at that age it was one of the most fun times of my life, haha.