Muddy boots

I grew up in New Jersey, and spent my college and veterinary school years in New England. I am used to the winter. Heck, I learned how to drive on the ice in NJ and spent over 30 days in a row where the temperature never got above 20 degrees in Massachusetts one winter. (Frozen pipes? Yep.)

I know that wouldn’t count as a harsh winter for my North Dakota friends, but it was touch much for us Mass folks.

In New England, once winter sets in, it gets cold and snows. It stays cold and that snow sticks around until the spring. Not so in Indiana. Indiana cycles through snow, rain, and mud. For months.
The week after Christmas, we got somewhere between 12-18 inches of snow, in two storms. On January 11, it rained somewhere around 2 inches. The snow melted and the ditches flooded.

And it made mud. Lots and lots of mud.

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?

I guess that makes me “that guy”

We had our first snow right after Thanksgiving. And I was out driving in it. I had a doctors appointment and ran some errands in Evansville. Crazy me.

It’s been a while since I lived in a second story apartment. Probably since 2004. So the snowy stairs were a bit of a surprise.

I think we need to start keeping a snow shovel in the apartment…

The view from above was actually quite pretty. But then I realized that I was going to have to clean all that snow off my (tall) truck.

It’s an Expedition, and I need to use the running boards to get in and out. So I can’t quite reach the top. At all.

Until about three months ago, I drove a Nissan Altima. I was low to the ground. I used to hate it when I would get behind someone who did not clean the snow off the top of their vehicle. I always ended up with a windshield full of snow.

Now, I hate to admit it, but I am those people. This is what my sunroof looked like (from inside the truck) right before I drove off.

Sorry, little cars behind me!

There’s just no way I’m going to be able to reach the top of this 00thing. And I think I’m okay with that.