Day 337: A Fall fall

They love their weather statistics here - average precipitation (are we ahead or behind for this month?), record high and low temperatures for every day of the year. The weather forecasters and news anchors also love to mark the seasons with comments on sunrise and sunset times and the equinoxes and solstices. As far as they are concerned here, winter will not start until the Winter Solstice on December 22nd. So, it's still Fall/Autumn at the moment - "Although the calendar may say otherwise, it certainly felt like winter today" said the news anchor this evening.

According to my never-proved-wrong wooden spoon measurement technique, we had 8 inches of snow at Exile Central today. Incidentally, I happen to know that as of yesterday we had had one inch of snow since Thanksgiving (seven inches less than average). Albaniana's husband and I had a safe but slow and at times difficult drive home from work. It started with brushing, scraping and shoveling before we even got into the car. We saw at least two cars that had slipped off the road into ditches, a huge pickup truck proudly displaying its winter-friendly '4x4' status as it snaked and slid along the road, a car stuck (temporarily) in a pile of snow as it tried to turn off one ploughed road into another. In the end I had to drop my passenger off at the end of his road leaving him to trudge down to his temporary residence (ours last winter) because the snow-plow had left a bank of snow across the end of it and I didn't have full confidence in the ability of my little car to break through especially since we were approaching from an acute angle. Apart from that, the car with its new all-season tires coped very well with what were generally accepted to be quite bad driving conditions.

I was delighted on getting home to find that half the driveway had been shovelled by Exile #2 so I could drive straight in to the garage. I did my duty by shovelling the other half and the path to the front door. An hour later than usual Exile #3 arrived home on the school bus. I managed to disguise my relief at having her home safely I think, and she chose her first words well as she walked up the drive: Wow, did you do all this? I did of course give my wife her share of the credit. The shovel deserves a good deal of credit too - I think that the whole drive-clearance probably took less effort than just getting through the pile across the bottom of the drive last winter using a garden spade.

Apparently E5N1 greeted his first real snow storm with a lot of excited Oo-oo-ing. Quite right too-oo-oo.