The White Stuff

As broadcast this morning on my way to work at 8am:

"The good news is that the air is barely moving, so we have no appreciable wind chill.  The bad news is that it's currently negative seven degrees [Fahrenheit] without the wind chill."

Yeah, it's cold.  We've barely gotten a break since the last Packer game when Fox demonstrated that even Alaska was appreciably warmer than Green Bay right now or, as our Chamber of Commerce president put it, gave the impression that we're within a dog-sled trip of the north pole.

The cold, on its own, really isn't the problem.  People here apparently do know how to deal with cold.  But without even the occasional warm day, the snow doesn't melt.  The problems isn't heavy snowfalls, which we really haven't gotten a lot of, but rather snow accumulation.  Of course the cities all plow the roads, but now they're having to plow the snow piles so we can see around corners.  Heavy machinery and dump trucks started sneaking out about a week ago to start scooping the snow up and dumping it elsewhere.  (I want to know where those dump sites are, and I want a sled.)  They're having to dig out the fire hydrants.  When I went voting Tuesday at the local high school, traversing it's driveways felt like doing the trench run in Star Wars.  When an SUV ahead would turn a corner, it would immediately disappear from sight behind the snow piles.

You can click on the pictures for larger views. The fact that the neighbor's 4 foot high mailbox is almost buried in plowed snow gives you a rough idea of what's going on.  Many mailboxes are essentially little plastic doors inside of snow piles at this point.

That actual point of this image, however, is the pile in the background.  Every cul-de-sac in my subdivision looks like this, and yes, that's a street lamp sicking out of the top. 

My own driveway, looking out.  The snow is approaching three feet high here, and it isn't merely a bunch of snow pushed off the driveway - there's a ton of snow spread out behind the snowbank.

The neighbors on the other side of us have it far worse.  Any more snow and they're going to have their own version of the trench run going on in their driveway.

The wall of plowed snow outside our home.  Again a four foot mailbox provides some scale.  The two large divets in the pile are presumably from heavy machinery sneaking off with our snow in the middle of the night.  The piles used to be even larger.

This is the front of the house.  Pretty much all of the sidewalks look like this or worse.  The path is exactly one snowblower wide and one snowblower high (and by high I mean the top of the machine minus the chute, not the top of the intake).

Comments

[jaz]

I am insanely jealous of all the snow.