Sunday, January 24, 2010

Snow Day


It appears as if the snow has finally stopped falling. Or, at least has tapered off to a light sprinkling. But the destruction left in its wake is pretty intense!

I live in a city that is used to snow. We're right smack in the middle of the Canadian prairies. We know snow. We know winter. We have the infrastructure to deal with such situations. Weather will rarely stop the city from running as usual.

This morning, the buses stopped running. I have heard tales that, of the 28 buses that were scheduled to be on routes this morning, 12 of them were stuck in snow drifts by the time service was canceled mid-morning. When Saskatoon buses stop running, you know it was some serious weather!

Luckily, it's not too cold out, just snow and wind. So, trying to be optimistic, it could be a heck of a lot worse. Like 40 below kind of worse.

These are the kind of snow days that I like! Enough powdery white stuff to cancel regular plans (like my Sunday afternoon Rally-O classes), but not cold enough to keep us housebound! So out we went to shovel the driveway, the workout from which I am now recovering. Who needs the gym when you have a thousand* pounds of snow to move?

I didn't actually measure how deep the snow was, and the "before" pictures I took didn't look very impressive. So I have called on my handy-dandy furry measuring sticks!

Gio is roughly 19.5" at the shoulder. Romeo is about 14" at the shoulder.

Here I have tossed some of the snow into a pile along the side of the driveway, edged by the neighbour's house. You can see the "smooth" bottom layer and the "chunky" top layer (yes, I thought of peanut butter, too). The smooth layer is where the snow fell, while the chunky is what was tossed on top from other parts of the driveway. The fallen snow layer is about 3" below Gio's shoulder, so one could estimate that there was about 16" of snow on the driveway. It wasn't consistently as thick across the whole driveway though, thanks to the wind.


Of course, the most fun is jumping through the BIG pile of snow near the fence!



I love a good Snow Face!


* May be a slight exaggeration.

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