Day 42: Climbing the mountain

I've been wanting to use this photo, I actually took it some time ago. This was the view I had having taken the picture for Day 22's post. A long climb up a snowy hill to get back to the car. Fortunately there was only an inch or so of snow then. Uncompacted, the snow we have now is pretty heavy going.

Today the temperature peaked well above freezing for the first time since about Day 4 or 5. Some snow started melting although only slowly and as darkness fell the melt-water has frozen making things pretty treacherous (for pedestrians at least). We braved the icy side-walks in the city this evening to attend a homegroup meeting thanks to babysitting from T&S. It is great to be welcomed and to feel welcome, but belonging will take time I suppose.

Before that, I persuaded Exile #3 and Exile #4 to venture out into the backyard with me to build a snowman. It seemed that the high temperatures had made the snow packable, so they finished their tea and got all dressed up, we all went up to our knees in the untouched snow only to find that it was still too powdery (below the top layer anyway). Exile #4 promptly elected to go back inside, but her sister was in more adventurous mood, so we decided to attempt to climb the mountain cutting off the back garden from the drive and the front of the house. We discovered that deep snow is a great leveller - in more ways than one - in that both of us found ourselves sinking with each step up to our knees before the snow compacted enough to take our weight. Climbing over the pile of snow felt like a great achievement and Exile #3 was delighted to ring the doorbell to surprise the others once we had made it.