Monday, 16 February, 2015 – Between 6:30 and 8 a.m. – The Wind Chill Was -28°C / -20°F:
It took me quite a while to process the video I captured these stills from: My fingers were frozen and burning and I’ve got pretty darned good -highly insulated- gloves:
After I shoveled through three feet high drifts -twice- to get to the shed we keep the snowblower in- and then struggling through snow higher than the snow blower to cut a groove past the van and clear the four foot high mountain the wonderful snow plows left us- I grabbed the ‘Flip-Cam’ and took these photos- This one is looking through the porch door, across the outside porch, past the mostly buried garbage can protector to the van and beyond. —jrw—
Outside the porch door, you can see the snowblower, resting where the snow is not quite higher than it can handle. There were lots of interesting ridges blown by the winds during the storm. The one between the camera and the snowblower is almost three feet high.
Snow pile: The snow dug away from the porch and toward the shed was almost up to the porch roof at this point, 7-something a.m.
A couple steps back, you can see the -then, over six feet tall- pile of snow in a slightly better perspective here.
Looking past the six foot high pile of snow at the corner of the porch, to where the deer coming looking for handouts, The snow blower could not get down its usual path to the hill back there, I had to come out later and dig out by hand. Sorry, this is a bit more blurry than it looked as a thumbnail. Brrrrr-
This was our street in North Fredericton/Marysville around 7 am as a bus managed to go north on Canada Street – & looks like it could hide behind the mountains the plows left across the street from our house here.
Finally, with the driveway almost cleared enough to get the van out, I stopped for a while after the love of my life told me her building was closed at least until noon and I could thaw out and finish up later- This is what it looked like. Please note, I am six feet, three inches tall and the camera was at my eye level while I shot this. —jrw— And, There’s a Jeep Liberty buried on the left side of this photo, you can probably see a hint of the rear view mirror if you see that hint of black near the square-ish mound there. We haven’t gotten the Jeep out on the road since December.
Before noon I bundled up again and went back out and recleared the end of the driveway. The wind had given us a nice new gift of two feet high by about four feet wide blown snow curling around and clinging to the side that had been snow-blown out before 7:30 am when we learned that my favourite spouse couldn’t get into her building if she did make it to work on time. After she got out of the driveway I made a valiant effort to clear the whole driveway, as deep and wide as I could get it, and then learned I would have to manually shovel the path to where we try to keep a herd of deer alive through weather like this (we’re helping our neighbour, who has been doing this much longer and probably better than we have). The love of my life got as far as the Irving Station at the corner of Canada Street and Bridge Street/Crocket Street – gave up and came back home. That usual six minute round trip took more than half an hour.
So anyway, we thought we’d get off lightly this year after last year’s unusually tough winter, but the last four weeks look like they’ve given us about as much snow and tough going as all of last winter did. Should we look forward to another April Fool’s day blizzard?
————— Jim
