Snow day

As you’ve probably heard by now, we got a Christmas snow storm here in Indiana. Lucky for us, it held off until Christmas night, and we got to spend a nice relaxing day with our family before the “Blizzard of 2012” hit. Not everyone was upset about the snow – Sadie, our husky mix had a blast!

(Yes, she had somewhere warm and dry to go. She just didn’t go there. Silly girl.)

This is what we saw when we got up on Wednesday morning. Almost every window in the house got this winter treatment overnight. First the screens iced over, then they collected snow. Made it pretty dark inside!

The doors were not left out of the snow experience. And our outside tree was a little windswept…

It always amazes me how the wind moves on top of our hill. There were patches of bare ground that had been swept clean, and snow drifts 4 feet tall. The back part of the house got covered in snow, but it didn’t really stick to the front part on this side.

We intentionally left the barn doors open during the night. There is no center beam to hold the doors shut (makes it easy to get trucks and tractors in and out, but means the wind catches the doors when they’re closed). So… open doors meant snow inside.

My truck is behind this door… behind this very tall, still growing, snowdrift.

Farmer Doc spent about 3 hours on a tractor on Thursday afternoon digging us out. Here’s the garage after a bit of thawing and lots of plowing.

The trouble with a gravel driveway is that if you plow too deep, you move around a lot of the dirt and gravel that is the driveway and make lots of ruts and bumps. If you don’t plow deep enough, you don’t get all the snow off.

Getting down the driveway and this hill is the easy part. The hard part is getting back up. The trick is to start up the hill with just enough speed so you make it to the top on the first try… but not so much speed that you lose control in the snow before you get to the top.

It’s a fine line.

And… as I write this on Friday evening… it has just started to snow again. Which means we get to do this all again this weekend! Who’s excited?