Day 4.008: Wintry mix a.k.a. Big mess

It was time for another winter storm - this one brought a couple of inches of snow at breakfast time and then it started to get messy.

I shovelled the snow and then had breakfast - by then there were plenty of stories of accidents and problems on the road so I decided to work from home. A couple of hours later I went out and shovelled half-an-inch or so of sleet (ice pellets) - that was like shovelling sugar - heavy and awkward: spilling out of the shovel and rolling down the snow banks. By mid-afternoon the sleet was giving way to rain but the temperature was well below freezing so it was freezing on contact and turning the sugary sleet on the drive into a sheet of thick rough ice.

Exile #2 and I spent some time scraping off the top surface and then Exile #4 and I spent some time trying to get under the ice and break it up - with some success. Satisfying but muscle-straining work.

Although it was a fairly major storm, the end result will have been a reduction in snow depth as the sleet and ice weigh the snow down - it also did strange things to the snow piles on the deck.

And glazed the trees (these are the bushes by the front door:

Unlike in previous ice-storms, the grass is safe underneath the snow-pack. Tomorrow may bring more snow - and a chance to see how much damage and/or prettiness the ice has caused.