this is getting silly
higher and higher grow the piles!
It snowed again, and we got another day off. We knew all that by 5:30, but it was only once it got light out that we started to realize the full magnitude of the snowfall. Not that it was really that big of a storm—only another foot or so—but on top of all that we already have the situation is starting to become ridiculous. For example, look what we were greeted with when we opened our bedroom shades this morning:
yikes?
And we're on the second floor! (yes, the porch roof). We had to laugh, at the absurdity of that much snow and at the precise resemblance the snowdrift bears to the ones keeping the farmer in his house in that Shaun the Sheep episode (sorry for no youtube link: the BBC is brutal with their takedown notices).
I kept laughing when I went outside, perhaps because having to throw snow onto a pile higher than your head while shoveling the front walk is naturally amusing. The cars looked especially silly after I cleared the snow off of them; before I did they almost in proportion to the mountains on either side of the driveway, but shorn of their covering they huddled dwarfed beneath the piles. It was hard, though, to get anyone to come outside to share my mirth, because Harvey is kind of over winter. It's understandable: with all his gear on he can barely walk anyways, and three plus feet of snow on the ground doesn't help any. He's kind of given up.
Rascal, on the other hand, continues to try his best. He loves the snow on general principles, but even he is having a little trouble with the magnitude of what we're now dealing with. The upside is that, while he still exhibits his traditional snow-day rambunctiousness in the woods, it's pretty much physically impossible for him to run away. At the beginning of the walk he took a few stabs at romping away in one direction or another, but with the snow up to his shoulders in front it was pretty hard for him to make much forward progress. Even the path, with eight or ten inches of new snow in it, was tough going. I felt so bad for him by the end that I tried to get him to go behind me so I could break trail for him with my snowshoes, but he was having none of it. Exhausted though he may have been, he knew that his job was to scout. (As a side note, it's a good thing we know he's getting a lot of exercise: a vet visit today revealed he's now almost 80 pounds! While most of that is probably due to Harvey's unwanted food, some of it has got to be added muscle mass.)
My last chore of the evening was taking out the compost, which involved a great deal of shoveling and also snowshoeing. So much work, and it was all in vain when I discovered that everything in the bucket was frozen solid and could not be induced to come out by any efforts I could muster. And it was a really warm day too, as evidenced by Harvey's wardrobe in that picture up above. Still, making paths around the yard in order to accomplish household tasks made me feel like I real hardy northern farmer. I could get used to all this snow, I think.