Monday, the 16th of March, 2015 -( -3°C / +27°F @ 12:30 pm. The weather app thinks it’s “Mostly Cloudy” out there, but the sun is blindingly brilliant and I don’t see a cloud in the sky. )-
— We hear the word ‘Blizzard’ a lot lately. And I’m not talking about Dairy Queen’s thick, -mostly air anyway- ice cream concoctions.
— Somebody on the local CBC morning news programme up here noticed that too. So I’m not hallucinating. Or, at least, I’m not hallucinating alone.
— Yesterday’s Blizzard: it kept teasing us. it looked like nothing was happening half the time. So either Cathi or I thought it might be a good time to go out and get a jump on shoveling. Somebody, either on the weather network up here or on CBC this morning, reminded everybody that he or she had warned us that the snow was coming down light and fluffy, but it might not stay that way. The wind whipped the snow around so fiercely, there was nothing on the roof of our van, or in front, the windshield was clear, the grill was clear, the roof was clear and the side windows were clear. But there was a solid packed glut of snow beneath the back half of the van and a streaming bit of sculpted weirdness behind the van that was three feet high at the tail gate, more like two and a half feet high along a ridge and then a little bit higher and then dipping and rising again as it combined with other wind whipped snow flakes to rise to about four feet high and then bend around at four feet high and highter – until it leveled off and filled the canyon we dug to walk our deer saving oats to their feeding spot.
— Yesterday afternoon, Cathi went out and began trying to dig her way to the van, which was about halfway between the door and the street. She thought she’d done a fairly good job and reached her distination. I was ‘gearing up’ – locating and climbing into warm enough clothing to venture out into possible death and maybe worse- found a couple vests, put them on the bed, turned around, looked for a nice warm ‘hoody’ to insert between shirts and vests and turned around to discover that I had ‘Cat Help’ Moe- the Orange ‘cat and a half’ found one of the vests and crawled inside it and I don’t think he would call anything ‘the bee’s knees’ but he seemed to be enjoying the heck out of my vest and I didn’t want to argue with him. He’s got me trained, I guess.
Moe thinks it was awfully thoughtful of me to give him the nice fleece vest with “Alaska” over the heart. And he might be the sweetest cat in this world, but don’t forget about the dew claw he drove through my thumbnail when he did not want to have his prized matts messed with, one pass with the brush and whack- blood everywhere. 🙂 ‘And don’t you forget it!” And, yeah, he’s got the right idea, “So – this is how we should deal with any blizzard those global warming geeks can throw at us…” We can quote him on that.
— Jassper, however, wanted to get up close and personal with the howling wind and stinging snow. And then he was just as frantic at the outside of the door as he had been from the inside, and our black Lab ‘puppy horse’ was almost totally white when I opened the door, and in the time it took to find the camera and aim, much of the white had flown around the living room but there was enough left to make a statement:
“Oh yeah, there’s all this white stuff flying around out there, and- and- but then it felt cold, ya know? really cold- Why are you looking at me like that?” — Jassper.
And Yes this black Lab was almost all white when he came charging back into the house and didn’t break any legs sliding around corners, – dog legs or people legs – and after I got his face digitized He had enough white stuff still on his flanks here to show up in the photo. This is his, “See? I’m a good dog, I’m sitting nicely, doesn’t this mean I get a treat? Don’t you love me that much?” ‘Mommy’s sweat pants and slippers in the background. & ‘Mommy’ wearing them.
— I really should post two ‘spy cam’ shots here. One just isn’t enough:
12:53:45 am March 16th, 2015- Zinging snow flakes dancing for the “Deer Cam” — Intriguing, hey?
12:55:06 am, March 16th, 2015. Look very carefully at the ‘object’ or ‘anomaly’ between the far right window on the porch and the camera. This is a about one fifth the size of the full sized photo. The full sized photo has some intriguing details. What do you think you see?
Moe thought he’d like to go outside and help me with the snow at about 4 am this morning. This is as far as he got. He turned around and ran the other way so fast I thought I missed this shot. — This is after we shoveled the porch off twice earlier during the storm. That’s a full sized recycling bin to the left of ‘the cat and a half’.
4 am-ish Monday, 16 March, 2015. The wind had died down enough so there was nothing blowing around at this point. The reflector caught the flash- After I dug out to the street, before the *&^&*%^%$$!!! snow plow came along and left a nice ridge for me to re-shovel – Again, This is after we had shoveled twice and saw mother nature drop a not so subtle hint that our efforts went for “naught” – or maybe the drifts would have been eight feet high instead of four? The snow beneath the van was packed so tightly I decided to wait until I could see what I was doing before I even thought about trying to start the engine. Flirting with danger just shoveling the snow is bad enough. I was not going to tempt fate by not giving the carbon monoxide its due respect.
— I should probably quit here and continue with another batch of photos in a nice fresh new ‘post’.
~~~~~ Jim
