Death from above - part 2

No, it's not another bird story. It's Snowmageddon/Snowpocalypse/Snowlocaust!!!! Also known to the local forecasters as "Snowgasm" based on their delight in reporting this impending doom.  We - and judging from the satellite picture of Snowball Earth below, pretty much everyone else in the U.S - got one of those rare weather events that don't come around much any more, or at least nearly as often as we remember they did as children - a real live blizzard. 

The storm really started Monday, with a nice undercoating of freezing rain and ice to make things really dicey, and by Tuesday night the grocery stores had been raided of their supplies of milk and bread, and nearly everything in the city had been cancelled in anticipation of the next day. 

Earlier in the week there was some question about when the freezing rain was going to start, and Mandy was on her knees praying for it hold off until at least she got Noah off to school.  Fortunately Catholic schools are hard core, and don't shrivel in the face of impending doom.  I suppose having God on your side probably gives them some confidence. 

On Tuesday morning, this beast started rolling in, and dumping snow.  Pretty quickly the pace increased to about 1 inch per hour, and winds reached 40 miles per hour.  The governer declared a state of emergency, mobilized the National Guard and eventually closed I-70 for the first time in Missouri's history.  I was hearing reports of expected power outages due to the wind, so I emailed Mandy to make sure our flashlights all had batteries in them.  I don't know what good that would have done - maybe we could have sat around and watched each other freeze to death in the dark as the temperature in our old house plunged to match the brutal cold outside.   Based on our recent energy audit, at the rate our house circulates air this should take approximately 11 minutes. 

We wisely closed work early (for the first time in my memory) like everyone else.  It wasn't early enough and it took me a good five minutes to make it out of the parking lot amid the drifts that had already piled up.  There are days I really miss that crappy Jeep I had. The one thing it was top notch at was getting through snow with ease. 

I made it home without killing anybody, although I was sorely tempted to.  People, this is snow, not radioactive ash.  You have tires that will let you drive on this stuff at more than two miles an hour.  Visibility was a little limited, but the roads were actually in fairly good condition, not that it mattered to some of these nancies, creeping along a highway at 10 miles per hour while everyone else was going 40-50. 

I got home, and most of the way through the through the second day of having the kids trapped inside with her, Mandy met me at the door practically begging to go out and shovel the driveway.   She was dressed and outside before I took my coat off. 

By ten minutes later, I had figured out why she wanted to go out so badly, as Noah managed to wear through every last nerve I had in a short time.  My God, kids can sure get all button-pushy when cooped up. I wasted no time getting him dressed and he was still talking as I booted him out the door and closed it, with the words "I think Mom's around the corner somewhere.  Good luck.".  Slam.   He showed back up about 20 minutes later, covered in snow and snot, barely able to see out of the balaclava we put on his head that had now covered his eyes.  A little less steam in his engine though, and that was the important thing.

While she was out shoveling, I finished cooking the dinner Mandy made earlier. She and Noah also made a  chocolate sheet cake, because, you know, it's a storm and there's baking to be done.  I found out later it's a trait that runs in her family - every last one of them was baking bread, rolls, muffins and cakes during the storm of the decade (which is now 32 days old).  Judging from the grocery store shelves the night before, having bread available in an emergency is some sort of primal instinct. 

 I was too cold and lazy to get out and get any good pictures, but here are some of Mandy hard at work from the warmth and safety of the kitchen.  They really don't do a good job of capturing the amount of wind and blowing snow that was going on. It did a great job of removing any dead skin on one's face, and she looked like she had had a partial chemical peel when she came back inside.  With the wind, the news was reporting windchills of -25 to -35. 

"Hey, pick up the pace!"

Our hero hard at work!

That looks like it will hurt in the morning...

Yeti!

Mandy "finished" shoveling the driveway while the blizzard was still raging, and she and Noah delivered cake and food to the neighbors.  I went out later and dug out the front sidewalks.   The next couple of days were brutally cold, with lows of -8 and windchills in the quick-and-painless-death range.  This weekend, we'll teach Noah the fun of making snow caves with all the piled up snow, and probably make another visit to Suicide Hill. 

And now he has at least one snow storm where he can reminisce when he's old like me and say, "When I was a kid, we had huge storms where the snow came up to our hips."