The Day After the Storm

Today we woke up to clear skies and crisp air after Blizzard Jonas dumped over two feet of snow on us Friday and Saturday. It was time to emerge from the house and try to dig out. By afternoon we could get our car out if we had to in case of emergency. That was the goal. We're lucky that the farmer at the end of the street brought out his front end loader and helped.

Here are a few pictures from today. Unfortunately, it's hard to get an idea of deep the snow really is. But it was deep. For us, anyway. Another time I will show you many of the birds that visited us during the storm.

One of the lucky things about the storm was that the wind blew most of the snow off the tree limbs. Before the storm, they predicted the wind would blow down snow-laden limbs on lines and cause power outages. However there were very few outages in this area associated with the storm. You can see the oak tree in front of house is mostly bare.

Here's Ward shoveling the first pathway down the driveway. 

Luckily, our neighbor came to clear his mother's driveway with his front end loader. Her driveway is directly across the street from ours. In the process of trying to find places to put the snow from her house, he cleared some of our driveway, too. Yea!

I took a walk in the neighborhood to see if I could make it out to the main road. I made it and found the main road mostly wet. Our street went from barely passable to seeing blacktop like in this picture. However, the small side streets hadn't been touched. I think our neighbor cleared what had been done. 

Late afternoon, the blue skies got some high clouds.

The backyard remains largely untouched at this point. I'm not sure where the deer rode out the storm.

Thankful Sunday--January 24, 2016

I am thankful for a snow day.

As most of you know we had a big snow storm here yesterday.  We haven't done exact measurements, but it looks like we got about 2 1/2 feet at our house. Luckily, we kept electricity the whole time, so we had the perfect snow day. We were warm inside and had a good show outside to watch with the falling snow and visiting birds.

Also, the fact that we couldn't go out put us in a different frame of mind. We did some clean up that we never seemed to get to. We cleaned out three drawers, two baskets, and one cabinet. We found a couple of things we had forgotten about and found a couple of things we couldn't identify.

Today is dig out day. Right now the temperatures are in the teens and wind is still blowing. But the snow has stopped. And for the break the snow day brought to us yesterday, I am thankful.