Snowpocalypse 2013

Blizzard beginnings

It seems like old news now, but the blizzard named Nemo (seriously?) of a couple weeks ago was pretty dramatic.  I grew up in snow country (i.e., western New York) where getting a foot or two of white stuff overnight was not exactly news.  It was also not always a good enough reason for school to be cancelled, and for this reason I remember plenty of school mornings being shuffled outside with all of my siblings, shovels in hand, so that we could clear our own path to school.  Talk about teaching the value of an education.

Before the real stuff started

Yale was (thankfully) not taking chances, and preemptively cancelled clinical and classes the night before, which was a good thing because I didn't dig my car out until five days later and H. and I thought that what was going on in the two pictures above was pretty dramatic and exciting (about 10 PM on Friday night) - until we woke up the next morning.

The next morning.  That's my poor green Honda on the left!

It was insane.  There was at least three feet of snow burying everything, and the wind had blown drifts that were covering our entire porch, all the cars, and that were up to five or six feet deep in places.  But check it out.  Girl power, we shoveled our own porch and walkway, thank you very much.

Quite the workout

The boy and I climbed up our local mountain Saturday morning, before anything was plowed and while the trek up was pretty treacherous and difficult, the view at the top was incredible.

At the top

And then we slid on our bottoms almost all the way down the mountain, which worried the dog quite a bit - he kept trying to run in front of me and jump into my lap - but was great fun nonetheless.

Digging out

Our street didn't get plowed until Monday night, by a bulldozer who was struggling down the street.  Now, almost two weeks later, things are still a bit of a mess.  Workable, thankfully, but still tricky.  There are enormous piles of snow everywhere, and our street has about half as many parking spaces available as it usually does.  But the rain yesterday helped melt quite a bit, and hopefully the temperatures in the low 40's for the rest of this week will take care of some of the rest.

H.'s face the morning after was pretty priceless.  And when she asked me if I had ever seen anything like this before, I had to tell her that honestly, no, I hadn't.  I've seen serious snow before, but this blizzard was unlike anything else I'd ever experienced.  For several days, our house was full of a constant rotation of drying snow pants, boots, hats, and mittens.  We played in it, we dug through it, we slept, we enjoyed the break from school and work, we watched movies, we read books, we went a wee bit stir crazy.  We made lots of memories from the blizzard of 2013!