After the Snow

Well it has been an interesting couple of days. Before the storm, there were cancellations – the studio announced on Wednesday that they were going to be closed on Thursday which is when the worst of it was supposed to hit. Lots of messages from various official sources telling us to prepare and to not travel unless we needed to and to not park in the street so the plows could get through.

We were on the rain side of things for most of Wednesday. Good thing because if it had been snow, I can’t imagine what things would look like. I was watching the weather closely because it was supposed to turn to something frozen but the timing wasn’t clear so I was holding the window open to still make my lesson. Got a call from PJ around 3PM and they had cancelled group and all her other lessons had cancelled so I decided I might as well go ahead and cancel as well.

Which turned out to be the smart decision because the rain started to freeze a couple of hours later and then we had a combination of sleet and freezing rain. Not a great amount but enough that getting to and from the lesson would have presented many problems. Nothing worse for me than driving in freezing stuff in the dark.

Still, on Thursday morning, we had less than an inch on the ground and yet the forecast was still for 4-8 inches. Turns out we hit the high end of the range as it started to snow mid morning and just kept snowing. Wasn’t the big flakes you’d expect but it just kept snowing and snowing and snowing.

Sometime in the late afternoon, I noticed we had 8 deer in the woods behind the house. They were all lying down and I guess riding out the storm because not even deer want to be walking around in the snow. I think they had to get up a couple of times to shake off the accumulated snow.

Oh and we had some wind as well. Not a lot but the snow was dry and powdery and just blew all over so you ended up with spots with lots more than 8 inches. Needless to say, we weren’t going anywhere and we didn’t go out on Wednesday so that was two days in the house.

I have contracted with someone to clear my driveway but they have lots of other customers and businesses typically come first. The roads weren’t in the best shape but since it stopped snowing, I’m assuming most places were back at work.

The day was cold but sunny and you’d be shocked at how much melting we can get just from the sun even when the temperature stays well below freezing. So I thought I’d try to clear what I could just to take advantage of that. That was because the snow was on top of a thin layer of sleet/ice which you could either try to chip off or let the sun do it’s thing.

The problem was that once you got on to the part that goes downhill, standing on a thin bit of sleet/ice while trying to shovel snow is not really a safe thing to do. I gave it up mid afternoon and called the studio to say I hadn’t been dug out and wasn’t coming. They actually did come later that day to clear things off but OwnerGuy said PJ was out sick so I wasn’t going to my lesson even if I could get out. That was three days in a row of not going anywhere.

Life is back to normal today though. The main roads were clear. Neighborhood roads not so much. There’s snow piled everywhere and there are no long stretches of above freezing temperatures coming so it’s going to hang around for a bit. I had to shovel off the decks so I could get to the bird feeders since the snow makes it harder for them to find food.

The good news is that we don’t get this type of storm that often. I’m going to cross my fingers and hope this is winter’s one big shot for us and that anything else will be more reasonable and easier to deal with. And I’ll just keep repeating what is shown below.