Snowmeggedon '11

I readily admit that I don't take the weather people seriously when I hear their dire forecasts for our area. After all the sensationalism of the news over the past decade or so, I find I don't listen to their ramblings. Like when they said the Avian Bird Flu is a pandemic that is going to destroy us all, I've tuned out their disaster rhetoric. Such was my view on the upcoming storm. Words like "Storm of the Century" were used, which I found to be quite hilarious, considering we're only 10 yrs into the new century, thus not really able to accurately describe something yet as being the storm of the century. People then began making up their own phrases in an effort to mock our media a little. Things like the one I used in the title of this post, "Snowmeggedon" or "Snowpacalypse". I even have a friend use the phrase "Wintastrophe Snowpacalypse Blizzaster '11", which I thought was genius! I mean, it's all about scaring us into thinking we're all going to be buried alive for weeks and must rush out and stock up on tp before the world comes to an end and we find ourselves having explosive diarrhea the entire time we're caged in our homes like animals! I mean, I've lived in NY where one day it was 72 and the next day we woke up to 15" of snow on the ground. I lived in IN where we got a storm that brought over 2' of snow. So, a blizzaster that is calling for 10-15" doesn't really do anything for me. But, I must say, there have been a couple of storms that have been impressive. Not disasterous, we're-all-gonna-die storms, but entertaining storms to say the least. The storm they called for actually turned out to be pretty cool! First of all, it's the first snowstorm I can remember where there was thunder and lightening involved. That alone made it WAY cooler than I expected. Then the winds came and started blowing everything around. Wind always makes a snowstorm better, because then you can see really amazing drifts. Some parts of the ground are completely bare, while other things are buried. Love it!



About 11 pm last night, the snow had drifted against the house and covered up the furnace outlet, so Pete decided to brave the winds and dig a trench. Because the snow was up to the patio door, he had to start shoveling from INSIDE the house.

I tried to take a picture out the window of him. You can kind of see how he was doing.

This one is dark, but it's of the snow measuring stick the kids made with Pete the other day in anticipation of our epic storm. This was sitting on about 4" of snow. Even after about 6 hours of snow, it was getting pretty covered. The stick is 20" tall.

This morning, all that was showing was 3". So, looks like we got about 18"!

The chairs were getting buried last night, which I thought was awesome!

You can see that we won't be using those anytime soon. ;-) Funny though, right beside the chairs is a complete bare spot by the grill. Love how the winds affect the piling of the snow.

Here you can see some of the bare spots. It drifted pretty well by our front door. So, really, though it's not the "storm to end all storm", it was a pretty fun one to watch. And, we're all enjoying a great day at home together today. Getting ready in about a half hour to get outside and enjoy it too, so I'll be sure and take some pictures of that as well. So, thanks "Blizzaster '11" for giving us a great day to play!