The sun is shining and the grass is green / Under the three feet of snow, I mean.

As you can see from Gorilla Girl’s last two posts, we got a bit of snow up here in Massachusetts over the weekend. Here’s a brief recap of the weekend of misery.

Friday morning, the forecasts were calling for snow to start in the afternoon, and start coming down at a rate of 1-2” per hour. Of course this got everyone into a tizzy, but memories of a storm last December 13th were still fresh in everyone’s mind. (In that storm, the same night as the America's Test Kitchen holiday party, the snow fell at a fast clip right around rush hour, making a traffic nightmare. One co-worker of mine said he sat in traffic on Harvard St. in Brookline for over an hour without moving an inch. In fact, a person and his son went into a restaurant right next to his car, ate dinner, and came out while he sat there.) Because of the worries that storm caused, a lot of schools closed early or canceled altogether, and the Mass government workers were told to stay home.

The snow started falling in Brookline right around 1:00 pm, and the Town of Brookline called a Snow Emergency to start at 3:00 pm, which means all cars must be moved from the streets. ATK called work at 2:15, but I was on my way home by 2:00, knowing that the western suburbs would get worse a lot quicker than downtown. Traffic on the way home for me was really light, but the snow was starting to pile up on the roads. In Weston it was coming down even harder, and the traffic started to pile up. I took one back road on my way home, and saw a car in the ditch. I have no idea what they were doing, but I’m guessing it was too much speed and not enough respect for the snow accumulating on the roads. I got home by 3:00 pm, and the ground was already completely covered.

It snowed all day and night on Friday, and by Saturday morning, it was piled up pretty well. (And to top it all off, I woke up with a bad cold. Great.) Sage and I got an early Christmas present around 8:30 am, though, when Doug from next door (yes, our next door neighbor is called Doug too) popped up in our driveway with his snow blower. Hooray! He did most of the driveway, and I was extremely thankful. The snow was still coming down, but it was supposed to stop/diminish by the afternoon, and then have flurries the rest of the weekend. Sage and I headed out around 11:00 am to finish the driveway, clean off the cars, and dig out the mail box. I measured the snow when I went out, and it read 8.5”. Not bad for not even 12 hours worth of snowfall. The snow was very light though, as the temperatures were in the 20’s, so it was relatively easy to shovel. By the time we finished, an hour or so later, there looked to be another inch of snow already on the ground! We headed in to the house to warm up and wait out the storm.

The snow kept at it, lightly mostly, all Saturday afternoon, and we woke up Sunday to a very fine mist of snow/sleet falling. I also woke up with my head cold getting worse and worse. Checking out the forecast, they said we’re under a new winter storm warning -- again! More snow during the rest of Sunday, with accumulations from 6-12 inches they said. Well, this was unexpected, and a good thing we postponed our luncheon with Mary and Grandpa Ingham. We hung out during the day, but at 3:00 pm we decided we better go out and shovel before it gets dark. Once more I dipped by ruler into the snow, and it came out 6.5”. So by 3:00 pm Sunday we had at least 16” of snow – and still coming down. Doug next door didn’t reciprocate the snow blower treatment on Sunday, so we were on our own to dig ourselves out. This time the snow was a lot wetter, so it was heavier than Saturday’s – much tougher sledding (so to speak). We decided not to brush off the cars, as if it stayed wet and heavy and iced over, it would be harder to clean off the car on Monday morning if it was cleaned off on Sunday. (I know it sounds crazy, but it makes sense. With snow on the car, then I’d be brushing off snow covered with ice. Without the snow, I’d be chipping away at only ice to get the car out of the mess. So it’s best to leave the snow on the car when wet snow/ice is expected.) We did the driveway quickly, and then I figured I better get some of the snow off the eaves. Our landlord had said we should clean the snow off the eaves, but not the entire roof, whenever we can. He’s got this nice roof shovel to take care of that, and it was pretty easy to get it done. We then went back inside for the “longest evening of the year”, as Bobby Frost once wrote.

This morning the alarm went off at 6:15 am, and I headed out to see how much more snow was out there. My cold has now traveled all the way up my nose and into my head, so of course I was really looking forward to shoveling for the 3rd day in a row. And of course I had to – we had another 3-4” on the driveway. Brushing off the car was a chore, as there was close to a foot on the car to get through. Then I had to dig out where the plow had come through, and that all took me about 30 minutes. After a quick shower I was off to work.

So bottom line is that we unofficially ended up with 19” of snow since Friday afternoon. I was a bit shocked at how bad the roads were this morning driving in to work. I know it’s a lot of snow, but you’d think they’d be used to that up here and have it removed much more than they have. But I guess even up here almost 20” is tough to battle. Rain is in the forecast for Wednesday, so there might be a huge melt coming up soon. But for now, my cold is raging, my back and arms hurt from the shoveling, and winter has only just officially begun. I think I need a Caribbean vacation.