Snow Week!

Well, I've been meaning to post on our Snow Day that we had on Christmas Eve, but since there is still plenty of it left on our road, I guess I need to call it a Snow Week!

We generally don't get much snow here, maybe an inch or two a couple times a year, but we got about 4 or 5 inches this time, pushed by 30 - 40 mph winds so we ended up with some pretty impressive drifts in a few spots. The main road that we get to our house on runs east and west and is below the normal lay of the land it ended up looking more like a snow drift than a road!

Here's a picture of our mailbox last Thursday evening. The line you see in the snow between the 2 tire tracks is the rear differential of our 4x4 pickup dragging in the snow.

We didn't get out to play in the snow until late Friday afternoon (Christmas Day) but the snow wasn't going anywhere. Cathy had fun getting to the mailbox to see if there was any mail since we hadn't checked it on Thursday!

Nope. No mail! The old saying about come rain, snow, sleet or hail isn't really that accurate, we are still picking up our mail at the post office a week later! The joys of country living. This kind of gives you an idea of what the road was like. Going West the drift was at least 3 feet deep for a couple hundred yards.
Not as pretty of a picture, but I took this one this evening. The snow is still a couple feet deep! (still no mail!)
It was actually worse going to the East. The drift was 3 to 4 feet deep to start with, and it goes a full mile in that direction.
Here's the same drift today. It is still over 2 feet deep along the North side of the road.
Here's the road that is actually passable. Those ruts are about 8" deep. My 4x4 Trailblazer occasionally drags high center going through them. You feel like you are in a pinball machine bouncing back and forth in the ruts.
While the roads haven't been fun to deal with, we have had some fun in the snow. Eli had a blast! He loved every minute of it. He said "My skin hurts" after he had been playing out there for a while, it really was the first time he actually got to play in the snow in his life, since it normally melts right off.

First thing he did when we got outside was plop down and make a snow angel. It is amazing what they pickup on their own, we hadn't even mentioned making a snow angel before he did it. The snow had melted a little and refroze so there was a crust on the surface that made it a little harder to play in than when it was soft and fluffy. You could almost walk on the top of the drift, but then you would find yourself breaking through and being waist deep.

After I broke through in one spot I dug it out a little and dropped Eli in there. It was pretty much as deep as he was and it wasn't all the way down to the ground. At one point Cathy looked over and couldn't see him and got a little freaked out, but then he popped back up and started trying to climb out.

That's pretty much it for 2009.
There are a bunch more pictures of Eli playing in the snow if you are interested http://padens.com/v-web/gallery/album09?page=9
They start in the middle of that page and go onto page 10.

We've had a great 2009, hopefully 2010 will be just as good if not better. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

Nathan