Holy Snow Batman!!

This is the last picture of our Icicle of Doom along with its companion Light Saber Icicle of Doom (the light-filled beam from the upper corner of the eaves. One day of 40-degree temperatures plus storm-bringing wind wiped both of them right out. We have a new collection of icicles hanging from both the upper eaves and the porch. Owen gleefully knocked off the ones right over the steps.

The weatherman was right on the nose for the timing of this storm to start. Mark Eubank said it would hit around 5 p.m. Thursday. When we looked out our front room windows a little after 5 that night there were fat, fluffy flakes swishing around outside. By the time Justin got home around 8 p.m. that evening there was already four or more inches on the driveway. It took three different people three runs to get the Camry up the driveway into the garage. When I got up Friday morning at 5:30 a.m., this is what I found looking out my front door:

Fifteen minutes later, this is what I had managed to clear:

After 30 minutes of hard shoveling I hadn't really made much progress. Maybe my repeated photographs had something to do with that. In any case, I roused the troops at 6 a.m. to help shovel the driveway because Justin said he needed to get into work early. Nothing like a little snow shoveling to get the blood circulating first thing in the morning! Nineteen inches of snow, to be exact-ish. The photo below was taken with the night-time setting on my camera so you can see across our cul-de-sac. All of the kids had a great attitude about being gotten up so early to shovel so much snow. That might be severely tested if this were a regular occurrence here. 

Liam dances his Tusken Raider victory dance. Bronwyn doesn't appear too impressed.

Liam, Bronwyn, and Owen show off our enormous snow piles. Just to give you a comparison, Owen is about 5'9" or so. Bronwyn is exactly my height.

The younger two kids got a snow day from school. In fact, most of the schools in our town declared a snow day. Further north, though, there were only a couple of inches of snowfall. Owen and Evan still had to go to school...once I could get out of our neighborhood. The only plow to visit our neighborhood plowed our circle late morning, but none of the surrounding streets. They still remain heavily snow-packed. Here's what things looked like once the sun finally came up. You can see the Icicle of Doom is all gone. 

The snow from our cul-de-sac has to go somewhere! Bronwyn is in the pink coat playing with a couple of her friends. These mounds now sport some caves and slide runs. I liked seeing the kids in our neighborhood playing outside in the snow. There were some dads towing their kids through the neighborhood on rope-towed inner tubes.