The Old Man arrives

Winter that is... in a fucking dumpload of snow this weekend. the weather all last week was warning of heavy snow for the weekend, up to 19" forecast in town, up to 3 feet in the mountains. As usual, I take weather reports with a grain of salt, especially forecasts that are more than 3 days out. But they hit the nail on the head this time. It started Thursday night right on schedule, and although we didn't see much accumilation Thurs., Fri. or Sat., we woke up to a whole new world Sunday. I guess I picked the wrong night to get tee-totally shitfaced and stay up until 4 am playing Halo3!

My wife woke me up at 8 to show me the 5" branch that had split off of our neighbors' tree and land on their car. All over town branches were down and power was out. Our other neighbors across the street had a huge branch in their driveway, I would estimate the main part at about 4-5" in diameter. Driving down our street is a veritable obstacle course through the downfall. They even released an "emergency only" travel restriction on City streets, Something I have only seen a couple of times in my life. They rarely do that in town, usually it is on the highways.

So, the snow finally starts to lighten up by Sunday afternoon, again, right on schedule, yay weather dude! Parts of the City got 22" of snow accumilation, we got around 12-15" at the deepest parts in the backyard. The ski town an hour south of us got 40".... IN TOWN!

My wife and I decide to get started shoveling late in the afternoon, It's not too bad, the deepest part was right in front of our garage... about 10" deep, but it was very wet and heavy. She started on the sidewalk which didn't have much because of the trees on the boulevard, while I started at the garage. She had finished the sidewalk and was working on the lower part of the driveway when we heard a very large snap. I was around the corner of our house, up by the garage and didn't see the branch fall, but I could see her staring in its' direction in disbelief. I walked up towards her and saw the branch. It fell right across the sidewalk, right where she was not minutes before. A very large branch... large enough that she would have been seriously injured had she still been there. From now on, we are waiting for the snow to melt more before either of us even attempt to shovel under those damn things!

The fun thing about the storm is watching our 8 month old lab/golden retriever/shepard mix puppy play in the back yard. He is such a ham! he runs around like a spaz, then falls to the ground and lays in the snow. then he gets up and plays like he is a bulldozer, pushing his head down in the snow and then plowing it around. The goofball. I included a couple pics below. The weather is supposed to change again this week and hit 65 by the weekend, but that probably won't happen, the good weather news doesn't ever seem to be as accurate.

Goofball:

here is the murderous tree branch on our sidewalk, the main part is a little over 2" in diameter.: