Not-quite-wordless Wednesday: Snow Day

When Rowan ran me over looking for breakfast at 4:30 a.m., the snow that had arrived during the night was already about 10 inches deep. At 11:00 a.m., my father and I headed out to start clearing snow. By then, the snow was 21.5 inches deep, and it was still coming down.

21.5 inches is just about my shoulder height.
By the way, all those white dots in the photos are falling snowflakes.
They show up really well against my black fur.

The plow had made brief passes twice during the night. Rather than clearing the circle of our dead end, the main effect was to leave giant wheel-ruts, some areas with less snow, and several deep snow banks in the middle of the circle.

The ruts were really useful to stand or run in.

Of course, getting to those ruts involved a lot of wading through two feet of snow. Unlike the neighbor's kids, I had blue jeans not snowpants. I ended up caked with snow, between wading through the the drifts and the ongoing snowfall.

I'm not sure what she's complaining about,
bounding through this stuff is a lot of work!

Oh, and those neighbor's kids? Lots of FUN!
I just wish they'd let me lick their faces more.

By 2:00 pm, we'd cleared the driveway, the front walk, the part of the sidewalk that wasn't under a giant frozen snowbank, and a thin strip of the circle in front of our mailbox. It was still snowing lightly, but it was time to break for lunch. We hadn't seen a plow all day.

This was the view down the street.
It's much easier to walk where Grandpa has used the snowblower.

At 3:45 p.m., the plow was still absent. I finally broke down and called the environmental testing laboratory to tell them that I didn't think I would be able to get to work that afternoon. Attempting to plow my Ford Escort Wagon through two feet of snow in the road would be impossible. I was told that all of the courier runs had been cancelled, and that there wasn't really any work to do. It was a fully sanctioned Snow Day.

Of course, the plow arrived within a half hour.

Intruder alert! Wuff! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

However it was just as well that I didn't have to go to work, because the plow did not fully clear the circle in front of our house. Instead it left a six foot high and fifteen foot deep pile of snow at the base of the driveway. If my car couldn't go through two feet of snow, it certainly wasn't getting through that wall of snowbank.

See, I was right to growl at him.
He should not have left this stuff here.

It should be over here in the main snow pile instead!
Plus he left all these messy stray tracks of snow.

Hopefully we'll get fully plowed out sometime tonight. Having the driveway blocked is worrisome. I've told Chandler, Ashke, and Rowan that they are not allowed to need the Veterinary Emergency Clinic tonight. It looks like I'll have to help clear out the three inches of snow that fell after the snowblower cleared the driveway, and do some clean up work on the walkway tomorrow. Chandler didn't get a walk today, due to the depth of the snow. By late afternoon, most of the street had dug out their driveways and sidewalks. Tomorrow's walk should be interesting. We haven't had this much snow in a while.

Sidewalk snow canyons are fun!