Saturday, January 19, 2013

Gandolf, the White Blizzard....Wizard

(There is a good amount of reading but then you get to the pictures)

I never knew that they named winter storms but I guess people named this one Gandolf, which I find HILARIOUS.

Thursday night was a little crazy for us.  At 3pm, snow started coming down hard and just kept coming.  Aaron called me at 5:20pm and told me that traffic outside his building was crazy and that he was going to stay on base working on stuff till it got a little better.  That sounded fine to me.  I would just hold off awhile on cooking dinner.

At 5:40pm, he texted me and told me that he was on Harrison.  It is normally a 10-15 minute drive once he is on Harrison and so I figured with the weather, he would be about 25-30 minutes.  That meant that I needed to start dinner, but first, I thought I would shovel the 5-6 inches of snow out of the driveway so that he would have a place to park the car....and see where the driveway was.

It's amazing how warm you can stay when you are constantly moving and working.

Feeling like a warrior woman, I went inside and finished up making dinner...but then I finished making dinner....and there was no sign of Aaron.  Another inch of snow had fallen and started covering up my hard work outside (Shoveling in a blizzard...I must be training for children).

At 6:40pm, Aaron called me to tell me that he was stuck about a mile from the house behind an accident and he didn't know when he would be home.

It was about 5 minutes to 7pm when he finally made it to the house and so we had to hurry out of the house to get to a Cub Scout planning meeting.

The night was crazy...getting back from the meeting was another adventure since we couldn't get back up this hill to get home.  We almost made it to the top but the car just couldn't do it so we had to drive in reverse down the hill...in the dark...with the back window covered in ice and snow.  Luckily no one was on the road.

Good times.

We went to sleep with the storm still coming down outside.

At 5:55am, I got text messages from the Universities Emergency Contacting System and then a phone call telling me that school/the preschool was going to be closed all day.

But...since I was up, I got up and went outside to help Aaron unburied so that he could get to work.  He had been driving the Saturn to save on gas but he knew that to get to work, he was going to need the SUV.

We both had our jobs.  Aaron was had to shovel out the drive way up to the SUV so that we could switch the cars.  He wouldn't let me shovel because apparently I was 5 1/2 months pregnant or some nonsense like that.  It didn't stop me the night before.

But he got to work on the driveway and the sidewalk.

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My special job was to find the SUV.  We knew that we had parked it somewhere along the driveway.  But with 6+ inches of snow on it, it was a little hard to find.
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I used a special tool that all the great SUV finders from around the world use.  You might call it a "broom" but I like think of it now as a "Industrial Snow Brush".
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I found it!!!  You can't see from this angle, but I couldn't brush off any of the left side, until Aaron backed it out.  So, he backed it out to the sidewalk and I brushed the left side off then...you know...so he could see before he backed into on coming traffic.
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This is a shot to show you how long our driveway is.  This isn't even all of it but in the winter we park closer and closer to the end of the driveway.
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Pregnant or not, I'm happy that Aaron did all that work because I don't think that I could have done nearly that much shoveling.

Heading back into the house, you might notice that the path we made to leave the house, was already getting a good amount of snow on it.
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Another one of my jobs before finding the SUV, was to throw down some road salt.  Can you tell what I salted and what I didn't?
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Once inside, Aaron went to warm up with a shower and get ready for work, and for the first time in our marriage, I was awake to make him breakfast before he went to work.  I had some hot cocoa while Aaron sat down to some French toast.  All in all...a pleasant morning for me.

The dogs?

They had a tougher morning...mostly Pippen.

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Bambi just goes into the snow and does her "business", no worries.
Pippen....he has to go "Number Two" in a certain spot....in the back of the yard.
Follow the path with your eyes.  You might not be able to see him...but he is out there.
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Once he finished, he started heading back...taking a different route.  He was moving so slowly through the snow...it looked painful.  I started yelling to him, "GO BACK THE WAY YOU CAME!  USE THE PATH!"
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But he is a dog...and doesn't understand what I'm saying.
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Going in circles....it's kind of a metaphor for all the shoveling we do during a snow storm.  Hamsters on the wheel at this point.
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