Woke to this:
That’s a shot of my driveway and the neighbors tree. You can’t see the driveway? Neither could I!
We knew we were getting a big storm, but even when we went to bed last night the forecasts said the worst would be south of here (around NYC) and we’d only get about 6 inches. We got a lot more than that!
You know you’ve got hard work ahead of you when the snow is deeper than your giant-sized snowthrower! Luckily it was light enough the machine could clear it, but it was very slow going. Here’s my view heading to the end of the driveway:
After one pass:
And after some progress:
It was terribly difficult work and took a long time – over 90 minutes – but it was made all the more difficult by the fact it was damn cold! When I started it was 15 F (-9 C) and even with three hats and two pairs of gloves on I was cold. I started to feel my fingers freeze and for the first time ever ended up putting ‘hot hands’ (chemical heat packets) into my gloves, which helped a lot.
Here’s before and afters on the driveway and front steps:
And a shot of the edge of the driveway with a normal sized soap bar box for scale:
The officially tally as of 7 am was 17.5 inches. It’s still falling now as I write (around 10 am) but will taper off soon. We’ll probably end up with about 20 inches, which is a colossal fall for less than 24 hours.
As you can imagine the world seems to have stopped. Everything is closed and there’s a ‘state of emergency’ in effect keeping vehicles off the road. Not that there needs to be: our street hasn’t been plowed yet and it would be virtually impossible to drive through this:
The good news of the forecast is for frigid conditions to continue for at least the next two weeks. It seems 2020 will be a white Christmas 🙂