Make It Stop, Make It Stop, Make It Stop!

So, if you don't live here in the PRP you might have heard something on the news about how we're having our worst winter weather in forty years. Well, I haven't lived here for all of the last 40 years, but it's certainly the most snow I can remember. We've missed two weeks of church, most of the last week of school before winter break, and the last bit of our Christmas shopping will remain undone. It started just over a week ago on Sunday, December 14 (one day into our thankfully-short stint of furnace-free living; by the time the furnace was repaired Monday at dinnertime it was 45 degrees in the living room). We got all excited, and Newton did some sledding, and we started taking pictures. For the first week, although lots of stuff was canceled, there wasn't really all that much snow accumulation, just cold temperatures that kept any of the 1-2" we had gotten from melting. (Our street, thanks to its status as the neighborhood sledding hill, was burnished to a high sheen.) That changed starting last Saturday, when it snowed ALL DAY, piling up 8 inches of powder. It even drifted a little, unheard of for here. The boys went out in the middle of the day, in the steadily-falling snow, for more play.



And here are our backyard composters (they stand about hip height):


Saturday night late, the snow turned to freezing rain, so the 8" of powder got a 1/4" shell. THEN it kept snowing, and snowing, and snowing. Pretty soon we had about a foot total, and the composters looked like this:


Winter Wonderland? Um, yeah. We've been unable to drive out of our neighborhood since Friday afternoon--basically no streets were plowed. Yesterday we called on friends for help, and one super helper came and picked me up in the afternoon to run errands in his Land Rover. Then we were able to go to a party yesterday evening by having another friend pick us up in his tricked-out jacked-up diesel suburban with gnarly chains. Cindy Lou was the only one dressed up for the party, since she was the only one who was guaranteed not to have to tromp through the snow:


Here are more shots I took today of our street, yard and house. I'll probably have to update tomorrow, since it's now predicted that we'll get another 3-5" starting tonight around midnight. I heard that the streets are now plowed to within a block of our house, so there's a good chance our guests will be able to make it for Christmas Eve dinner (stay tuned! I'm making a bûche de Noël, because I am just that crazy), and maybe even a possibility that someone will be able to pick up my mother-in-law at the airport (assuming her plane can land). Oy.