Day 3.045: Fort, tunes...

Before breakfast, I got dressed up in snow-gear picked up my shovel and went out to do a shift on the driveway. At that point we had had nearly eleven inches of snow and the drive had six that had fallen overnight.

Shovelling was very hard work - the snow was very heavy and packed together into solid blocks with a bit of pressure. I did about a quarter of it and then came in for breakfast. After a break I went back out to finish up. After a bit more shovelling, our neighbour offered to lend me his snow thrower. Oh yeah!  I was quite tired by this point and decided that the roads still looked ugly and I would stay at home and do the work I needed to get done and take the rest of the day off.

We have branches down and some very sad looking conifers again - the wet snow acted much like ice does - coating branches and weighing them down heavily. Later in the day these huge snow balls were falling from the trees in a quite dramatic fashion.

Since I had discovered that this was, unlike most previous major storms, good packing snow - I decided a project was in order. This is what we came up with.  By the time we finished it (after a couple of attempts to curve the walls in to make a roof had failed - dramatically) it was raining lightly and we used a tablecloth to make a partial roof.

It had a couple of windows.

Room for all of us, and a rather nice - if suspicion-inducing - doorway.

It didn't last long after we deserted it to come inside - it's now an indistinct pile of snow in the middle if the grass.

This afternoon, everyone watched The Sound of Music, I was surprised in reading about it afterwards to find out that it is based on a true story.  Most of the stuff written about it focusses on how inaccurate it is - but I was struck by how much is true.  Maria herself lived four hours drive from here until her death in 1987.

There's a chance we will get some more snow, rain and ice over the next few days.  Looks like the groundhog got it right this year.