Winter Wonderland

The snow started sticking around 2:00 yesterday afternoon. It accumulated very slowly, however, because the temperature was still around 38 degrees. It was such wet, heavy snow. I kept up with the shoveling because I knew it would be crazy if I didn't. Bob and I shoveled for the last time around 11:00 PM. We also shoveled off the deck, or most of it anyway--we left intact the area around our yardstick so we could keep track of how much snow we got. (But then I later read that you are SUPPOSED to keep track accurately by measuring every 6 hours, then clearing away the snow and starting over. This prevents compaction of the snow on the bottom. Oh well.) When we cleared the deck, we shoveled off around 12 inches.

It continued to snow all through the night at a rate of 1-3 inches per hour. It was really coming down! It snowed pretty steadily all day long as well. In the end, we got over 30 inches. Here is what our street looked like before lunch. I'm standing in the cul-de-sac looking up the street towards our house. The second big tree on the right is ours.

Here are our vans. I was very glad they were in the driveway! We joked that the big van looks like one of those vans for handicapped people, where you can stand up inside! As you can see from the driveway, we pretty much gave up on shoveling it. There was at least 12 more inches of snow in the driveway this morning, and it was so tiring trying to shovel it all! It was so heavy! Finally we did the walkway up to the front door, and that was a big enough undertaking. We ended up just shoveling off the top layer of snow off most of the driveway and calling it a day.

Our mailbox looks like Marge Simpson in her old age, LOL. The snow comes all the way up to the box part.

Here is a picture of the deck, out our back door. You can kind of see the line where we shoveled to last night. Our yardstick is just to the right of this picture. You can't even really see it anymore. It's almost totally buried.

This is looking across the street at our neighbors' house. You can see the damage this storm did to their trees with all the wet, heavy snow. The tree in their front yard just sort of collapsed. Then the tree in their side yard fell forward, but I think it may spring back. Then one of their neighbors' trees fell against the side of their house. We definitely have some tree damage in the back yard, including one tree which looks like it is just being held up by another tree. Several large branches are down too. I guess we'll deal with that after some of this melts! We can hardly get around to the backyard now, without floudering around in thigh-deep snow!