This is what I found this morning when I opened the garage door.

We decided to grab a pizza last night on the way home. We figured it would be a great night to just hang out, watch a movie, and let the snow fall. We should have known things were going to go terribly wrong. First, we had a power outage that was an off-and-on inconvenience throughout the night. We had pizza by candlelight, which was actually kind of fun even though it wasn’t planned. At “lights out,” it looked like there was about six inches of snow, but to be honest, I didn’t look at it too closely. The forecast was for a maximum of 18-inches, but it almost never happens that way, so I figured there was no need to do any plowing until morning.

When I opened the garage door this morning, I about crapped myself! Not only did we get the full 18-inches, we got an additional eight, which was like icing on the cake you might say. The last time I saw snow similar to this was back in 1993 when I was in college, and I had no snow clearing responsibility. Even then we got just over 20 inches, and it didn’t seem that bad because most of it melted within a week after some unseasonably warm temperatures.

Arrow and Sooky seemed to love the snow, especially when I finally cleared them a path. The snow level was higher than both of them.

The problem with 26 inches of snow (okay, there are many issues with this much snow) is it’s too much for a snow blower or an ATV with a plow, which pretty much describes my snow-clearing arsenal. I don’t count the shovel because it’s my “last resort” tool. That being said, the first thing I had to do was shovel enough room for my car to back out of the garage so I could get the ATV out. To make a very long story short, I spent the entire day shoveling, plowing, and snow-blowing, and I only got about half of the 500+ foot driveway cleared. Despite the hard work, it was a pretty amazing experience, and Angela and I had a great time watching the dogs try to navigate their way through the snow.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow. I hope I can force the truck through some of the unplowed driveway to eventually get to the grocery store. I’m hoping while we’re gone that Consol will come through with their plow so they can get back to the treatment ponds. That would save me tons of work (literally), and make Super Bowl Sunday a lot more enjoyable.