An extremely rare large snowstorm (complete with thunder and lightning) arrived in our area last night and dumped six and a half inches of powder in the yard. The drifts were much deeper, and the airport actually reported 11 inches!
Darren was under the house finishing up the installation of our new inline water heater (love it already!) when the snow started, and by the time he came out of the crawlspace there were already several inches on the ground, with more continuing to fall.
This morning our street looked like this...
I know this won't look like a lot for those who live in areas where winter weather is common, but it's enough to shut our city down for a few days. We just don't have the necessary equipment on hand to clear the roads quickly because this almost never happens here. The last snowfall of this magnitude happened in 1994- 17 years ago! I didn't even live here then.
Darren and I both got the day off from work (our companies completely shut down for the day), so after cooking breakfast at home we went out for a walk around the university campus (which is practically in our back yard).
To say that everything was pretty is such an understatement!
We hung out at home most of the afternoon.
Darren wasn't actually throwing the snowball at me- he was aiming for one of the dogs standing at my feet. :)
Later in the afternoon I was feeling adventurous and wanted to go sledding, but since we get snow so rarely we of course don't own a sled. I Googled for "improvised sled" and came up with this article, and about 20 minutes later Darren had turned the cardboard from the IKEA boxes that hadn't made it to the trash yet along with some black garbage bags into some totally awesome ghetto sleds.
And you know what? They worked great for the nearly two hours that we spent running up and down the hill (again at the university) with them.
These photos were shot with my little waterproof, shock-proof point and shoot. They're nowhere near the quality of the D3, but it's the only camera I could have taken out in the snow like that!
So now we're both exhausted (and just a little sore from throwing ourselves headfirst down the hill more times than is probably sane). Hopefully we'll get tomorrow off, too, and we can do it again...but maybe this time in the kayak...