Let it Snow – NOT

Welcome, my friends, family and others, to the year 2010!

Over the past month, we’ve gotten more snow than I can recall in a very long time!  I do remember more… but I was a kid then!  I think it was the winter of 1970/71.  My cousin and I and some friends were able to dig tunnels in the snow from one side of our house to the other, all through our back yard.  I remember having little rooms off the tunnel.  It was great!

Back in October, the local weather personality predicted that over the course of the winter we’d have something like 30 inches of snow.  Boy, was HE wrong!

Back in October, we had our first snow.  It should have been a warning to us!  That first snow dropped 6 inches on us. I think the forecast was for 2.

Then, in November, nothing.

December started out cold, but dry.  Then, on the 12th, we got our first BIG snow fall… 12 inches in just under 24 hours.  The drifts in our driveway were huge!  And of course, our snowthrower failed to start so we had to dig out by hand.  We did just enough to get the car out so Scott could go to work.  Fortunately, the next day, we were able to get the thrower started and finish off the driveway.  The next two weeks were cold, no melting whatsoever occurred.

As Christmas approached, we were warned that we’d get another big snow.  It began Christmas Eve with driving snow.  It was really beautiful to watch, but both Scott and I had to be out driving in it.  By December 26th, we had received another 12 inches of snow!

So, by the new year, we had accumulated 24 inches of snow in the area. This presents a bit of a problem for the Hays-Strom family.  Much of our driveway is sunken in relationship to the rest of the yard, so snow must be tossed up over then retaining walls.  Not a problem for our snow thrower… in normal years.  But the snow fall this year is not normal.  Having a pile of snow in our front yard that is knee deep, on top of a retaining wall that is from 12 inches to 18 inches high means that the snow from the driveway had to be thrown up… a long way!

The last thing we need now is more snow!  Fortunately, as Saturday dawned the weatherman was telling us we would only have a light dusting of snow overnight.

So, this morning, I awake, look outside and my jaw dropped.  That light dusting of snow amounted to an additional 4 inches!  We didn’t have time to do any shovelling before church this morning, so we resolved to clear the driveway when we got home.

Unfortunately, returning home at 2 p.m. we couldn’t even get to within a block of our house… there was an accident up the street, and the police had our road blocked.  Parking the truck, we trudged through the snow to our driveway… to discover it was blocked.  The accident literally occurred right in front of our house.  A red pickup driving up Harrison with a man, his wife and his child, slowed as a white pickup came SPEEDING down Harrison, and swerved in to the wrong lane to go around a snow plow stuck in front of our house (on the other side of the street) and plowed – at speed – in to the oncoming red truck.  By the time we got home, the woman and the child in the red truck had been taken to the hospital (we’ve been told it was precautionary, that both were ok).  The twerp in the white truck … well, I’ll keep my opinion to myself!

Scott and I spent a couple of hours getting our driveway cleared, with help from the young man across the street who has a bigger snow thrower than us!

And they’re telling us we might be expecting up to 10 more inches of snow in the next several days.

I wanna move.

Someplace warm.

Mercury sounds pretty good, right now.