And Twice More Today! (Snow Blowing)

It's been cold.

Thursday night / Friday morning, we had 60 MPH gusts and we woke up yesterday with the thermometer reading -1° F (and you can imagine what the windchill was - something like -20°). -1° is cold but it doesn't compare to the -17° that we had last Valentines Day.

After that wind, we expected to find that all of our wreaths had taken off for parts unknown. All were in place but one bow was missing. We didn't expect to ever see that again but it had dropped straight down and was wedged between the granite slab that is our front porch and the house.

We walk every day but we draw the line when the temperatures get below zero. We attempted a walk yesterday after the temperature got up to 5° but headed back to the barn when we headed into the wind and it felt like our faces were going to wear off.

After and afternoon of melting followed by a very cold night, the snow took on an interesting dimpled look. I took these right before our 5° walk attempt.

This morning, we woke up to a fairly heavy snow with the temperature at about 17°. We took our morning walk in the snow and then, because it was about 6" deep in the driveway, I got out the snow blower. You might wonder why I didn't wait for the snow to stop falling. Much more than 6" and the blower has trouble keeping up.

Later, about 1pm, the snow stopped and I cleared another 6".  The forecast called for 3-6". Kristen measured on the front porch and got 6". I'm sure that I cleared 12". My theory is that we're dealing with some drifting. The driveway is low and collects more than average. The porch is higher and probably gets less than average. I'd bet that we probably had 8-9".

Kristen took these pictures of the second snow blowing of the day.

 

And I took this of a female cardinal looking for seed under the snow laden feeders. There's a male on the backside of one of the feeders, spilling a lot of seed.

The temperature's still rising and we're supposed to have some freezing rain a little later followed by regular rain. The next week or so will be above freezing and rainy so we'll have to see if we end up with a white Christmas.

-JC-