Winter Wonderland

We have been enjoying some crazy winter weather in the Loops the past few days. It started on Sunday with a snow storm. The storm started about 1 o' clock in the morning and continued for more than 24 hours. We ended up with a lot of snow and a fierce cold wind.



This photo is of our neighbour across the street, in true Canadian style he waited until the weather was at it's worst to hang up his Christmas lights. Don't worry Paul smartened up last year and put up some lights that stay up all year around.



There was enough snow for Paul to break out the snow blower, I think he uses it once or twice a year. It pooped out on him half way through the job and he shoveled for a while as well. I was having fun playing with the kids and taking pictures while Paul did all the work.



The kids seemed to be impervious to the cold. They wanted to go out and play in the storm so I set them up with some spray bottles with food colouring and hot water in them. They went out and painted the town red, and blue, and orange and green and purple and pink...they had a great time.

Dueling snow pistols:

This next set of pictures were taken Monday morning. When it gets that cold the snow is very light and does not stick, it is like little bits of Styrofoam that float all over. The light snow and the wind storm that followed resulted in some really cool snow drifts. Here is what we saw when we opened our front door:

Paul took this photo of the front walkway. He had to shovel his way to the truck to get to work Monday morning. He was so cold after shoveling he came back in and went to bed.

It was wild to see how the snow flew around the houses. There are bare patches where the snow never landed and then there are areas where the snow is piled higher than me. Very cool. Some lucky folks had all the snow blow off their driveways and onto their lawns, or into their neighbours.

This picture is taken inside the house. The condensation on the inside of the windows freezes up when it gets that cold out. Looks cool, but pain in the arse to keep the windows dry and clean up the melt. I wipe the windows down 3X's a day to try to keep the mess down. We leave fans on in the house all the time and that helps too.

I was lucky and did not have to do to much driving yesterday. The kids had observation day at school so I just drove 10 blocks or so to the school and back. Paul had left the van on the street in front of the house for the night. I went out in the morning to see if I could get the van out of a big snow drift. I decided I would just try to drive out of it and went back inside to get the kids ready for the cold weather. I was in the house for about 5 minutes, just long enough for the snow plow to come by and bury me in even deeper. We have great winter tires on the van and I had no trouble getting out.

This morning, if you can imagine, it is even colder. I think that is somewhere around -3F. It is a beautiful bright sunshine day, the kids have been outside playing in the snow for about an hour now. I am on my way to force them into the house to warm up for bit, when they are nice and warm I will let them go out in play in the snow some more if they want to.