I'm Leaving
That's it, I'm getting a ticket back to South Africa and not coming back until someone's figured out how to solve snow. The weather network I blogged about earlier must be using some kind of archaic and inaccurate scale of measurement because the supposed 10-12cm of snowfall predicted yesterday is more like 3 feet and it's still falling. There was a practical blizzard yesterday and so distribution isn't exactly equal, our side of the street was like the bottom half of an hour glass at the 45 minute mark, while across the road everything was fine and peachy. I feel like I've written about this before but because of the sheer height of the snow and the apparently insufficient size of my snow shovel I'm effectively shovelling the entire driveway 3 times. In other words there is a top, a middle, and a bottom to the snow cover.
Further more someone, and this could only happen to me, took all the left handed gloves in the house. AND HID THEM, or ate them, or something. This is a bad thing for two reasons. The first, is that it's -10˚C without the wind chill factored in. The second is that my extremities are extremely sensitive to cold, and after 5 minutes in this kind of cold(15-25 with super warm gloves on) my fingertips, followed by my hands lose dexterity, turn red, and lose all feeling except for something comparable to what it would feel like to have an elephant sitting on it. Then again maybe it's not me, because it seems my ipod can't cope either, if it's not tucked away against me it shuts down after 10 minutes and the little ipod on the screen starts shivering. Not looking forward to the fact that it gets as cold as -45˚ in late February.
On the upside every so often I find some snow treasure. Today I found 2 newspapers, and a pristine tomato that must have been inadvertently flung into the driveway by a Tomato Carrier while it was still snowing, as he was skipping down the street singing about growing methods, artichokes, and clucking like a chicken as they do. When you're on the virge of frost bite you're supposed to warm your hands slowly so as not to encourage them to fall off. Lucky you I chose to do that by writing this, but I still have to go back out there and chip away at the last 4 feet of snow—piled up by forceful snow plows, which left over night through a quazi-blizzard is a lot like rock candy and regret.
Update:
Thought I'd add some pics for the sceptical among you. The first one is of the peachy side, the second is not an artificial hill in any respect aside from one lump directly above the ruler, it's just how much snow there was.
