Spring Blizzard, part 2: digging out

Day 2 of the Great Spring Blizzard:

We sent the dog out again to look for the Wall Street Journal. He found it! And he brought it to the house! But then he tried to bury it in the snow. Isn't this fun?!Next, dear husband goes outside to shovel the driveway. (This actually occurred about 30 minutes after Yours Truly went outside to shovel, in order to clear a path behind the car to drive Lizzy to work. Nevermind that there were drifts over 2 feet high behind the car and that the snow weighed approximately 25 lbs. per shovel-full. I'm a devoted mother and that's what I do. But I digress).

Yes, here he is, in all his manly splendor! Ya' gotta love a man that can look manly while shoveling a 50-foot driveway with a little-bitty shovel while his neighbors get out their man-toys (aka John Deere tractors with snow plow attachments) and rev up the engines and plow their measly 20 foot driveways in about 5 seconds flat.

Let me tell you, that snow was HEAVY! Yep, it was the heaviest snow we've had to shovel here at Casa Nostra since we've lived here (that'd be about 6 years). We couldn't use our patented "snow plow" technique, which involves pushing the snow shovel back and forth across the driveway about 50 million times. No, we had to go with the old back breaking "lift and toss" technique which the Nazis banned years ago due to it's inhumanity.

It took three of us (dear huband Giuseppe, 15 year-old Edmund, and moi) THREE AND ONE-HALF HOURS to clear the driveway. As you can see from the pictures, the sun aided us by melting the snow as we were shoveling it, which caused it to stick to our shovels, necessitating a pounding action on the driveway with each shovel toss to knock the remaining snow off the shovel, only to be shoveled again with the next "lift and toss." But when it was all done, we were proud of our handiwork and vowed to look for a new man-toy next time Sears has a sale.

Yes, this is me smiling. I'm actually saying, "Could you hurry up and take the picture? I want to go inside and collapse!"

Spring Blizzard, part 1: the snowluge

We had a whopper of a blizzard last week. It began snowing Thursday morning and ended sometime early Friday morning. As they say in Colorado, "We really needed the moisture," and this was a moisture-packing blizzard.

The local public schools heard a big one was coming down and they cancelled school before the first flake ever fell.

Shortly after the white stuff appeared, we sent the dog outside to investigate and bring back an olive branch. He came back sans olive branch, but looking rather mournful that we'd sent him out on such hazardous duty.

My dear husband decided to forego the long trek across the metro area to work, and we declared a snow day! First order of business was to find the Wall Street Journal hidden somewhere at the end of the driveway.

There was no paper to be found...though we searched diligently for the better part of 5 minutes.

Yes, things were looking pretty bad out there.

I called the piano teacher to say we wouldn't be driving to her house that day.

The view of our street looking one way...

and then the other...

We couldn't even find our street in the white-out. And 15-passenger vans don't handle slippery streets very well!

So we decided to stay inside and wait out the storm.