Interesting snow storm

It's not often we get snow and ice and more snow and drifts all in one storm. 

Jeff started the day out early by thawing and chopping the car from the ice that had coated it for hours and then left for work at 5:00am so he could see his 3rd shift.  Since the company is at reduced hours, he does not see the 3rd shift at all and barely sees 2nd shift but he supervises all three shifts.  At this time it had barely started snowing again but had been sleeting for probably 18 hours on top of the 5 inches of snow that covered the ground.

By daylight, we had heavy snow coming down and it piled up fast.  It finally stopped sometime before noon.  The sun was pretty on the blanket of snow.  The kids were begging to go out but I put them off until I was ready to try to do some digging out.  I didn't think they'd be able to walk on the snow/ice/snow combination but the ice was thick enough to keep Sean and Sierra up on the top layer for the most part.  I'm not sure why we bothered to get them bundled up so they could eat snow.  I could have fetched a bowl of it for them to eat inside. 

 

Callie dressed somewhat eccentrically for her excursion outdoors.  Yes, that is a skirt with two pairs of pants underneath. 

I quickly found out that my boots are not high enough for approximately 10-11 inches of snow plus 1+ inches of ice. 

I went around front to begin trying to dig out the van just in case there would be public school tomorrow.   Sierra's preschool follows the p.s. schedule but, thankfully, we now know there will not be school.  I can't imagine why.

Dig is the appropriate word.  The picture below is after I took the top layer of snow off, revealing the layer of ice.  When I opened the van, the door scraped snow away. 

The top layer of snow was light and fluffy and easy to remove.  But the ice layer was very thick and heavy as was the snow on the bottom.  Can you say back spasms?  See the layers.

 

Sometime during these efforts, in the backyard, Sean threw some ice and accidentally hit Sierra between the nose and lip and she was bleeding.  I didn't enjoy having to walk around the house again through the snow and wasn't going to keep doing that to referee, so recess was over.  For some reason, I did not walk across on top of the ice but broke through on every step.  Hmm.   

Back out front for more digging.  Soon, Jeff came plowing our road with the car and made it halfway into the driveway before getting stuck.  The Honda with its front-wheel drive has always done great on snow, but it doesn't make a very good snow plow.  Thanks to the neighbor in the background, we were able to get it far enough in the driveway to avoid the snowplow that came down right after him.  Don't get too excited for us.  We never see a real snowplow on our street but the county plow had no choice but to give a once over on our street or he would have blocked us in at the end by the county road.  And of course, he missed our driveway by about 8 feet but we might be able to put in a garden in the median grass this spring since he did turn up some dirt.  Unfortunately, the stuff he plowed in front of our driveway is really really heavy... full of ice chunks.  Ugh. 

Usually, at some point, we get a private contractor in a 4wd truck with a snowplow on the front.  Occasionally, they will clean the circle really well, but usually they go once around it missing our driveway by several feet.  When they do this, we have to dig out again, especially so the mail carriers can access the mailbox.  If we don't keep a path clear, we don't get our mail. 

So, while we are breaking our backs, our smarty-pants nice neighbor (not the one who helped push the car) gets out his snow-blower and cleans his driveway in the time it took us to get about 4 feet shoveled.  Then he comes over with a shovel to chat but goes back to shovel a corner out.  He talks about how happy he is to have his new 4-WD.  The first he's ever owned and he will always have one from now on.  Thanks for the help We were thankful to be getting the exercise and we still like our Hondas. 

Our front porch is going to be ice until April because our gutter is full of ice... overflowing so anything that melts is freezing below on the porch.  I guess maybe that might take care of those solicitors we keep getting.  The icicles are pretty though. 

I am thankful for chili in the crock pot.  It tasted good tonight. 

I'll leave you with a picture that I took yesterday that I just happen to like.  This little guy has been hanging around our deck.