Snow

Part of Gina’s studies, entails detailed anatomy – here she is adding clay muscle to Mr Bones. Getting clay to stick to plastic bone is a nightmare and the sticky-jucky clay is no big pleasure either! I think she will be most relieved when she writes the last anatomy exam!

No warning on the radio and the meteriologists had to admid they were caught with their radar sets down – at ten this morning we got a sudden snowstorm – one inch of snow per hour for more than three hours.

I was in Stillwater, 30 minutes from home, to deliver our tax forms to the accountant, and when I left her office, the roads were already very slippery – the roads department computer weather forecasts showed that the storm would by=pass the Cities and so they did not pretreat the roads the night before.

At every trafic light there were one or two cars that slid off the road – so most of us took it very slow indeed. At a larger highway the traveling was somewhat faster, until we got to the bridge crossing the Mississippi river – we came to a crwl and then stopped – for an hour! That’s about 500meters in 60 minutes.

This photo actually shows the river on the right – but the snow was coming down so thick that visibility was extremely poor. I had the car in ‘Park’ for long stretches at a time and it was times like these that I took these photos and other people got out of their cars to scrape the snow off the car windows.

When I reached the next turnoff, few cars were taking it because it led to to a very quiet part of the world, but it was a road I could take home – so I did. And that took me another 90 minutes (should have been 15minutes) – I saw very few cars on most of the way home – everyone by now knew to stay put and not travel unless you reaally reeeally had to!

And because nobody else made tracks, there were parts of the road that I kind of kept to the middle of the road by following the signs next to the road – you could not see where the sidewalk ended and the tar began.

At least I got home safely. The previous two Mondays saw an average of 22 car crashes in the Twin Cities – this morning they had 122! – Luckily mostly slow-motion car damaging crashes that did not have too many fatalities.

By two this afternoon it was all cleared up and we were way above freezing again.

After two weeks of warmer than freezing weather, all our snow had just about melted – only the large heaps in the parkinglots were left to show that we had good snow covering two weeks ago.

And I was dreading having to live for two months or more waiting for the green to appear and there be no snow on the ground! But this morning when we woke up, it was a different story! A good six inches lay on the ground and the schools were closed. The roads were a mess and it was still falling!

Because it was warm, the snow is very wet and clings to everything – it turns the garden into an absilote fairyland…. and it broke one huge branch off a liloc we have standing right behind our house…! All the branches are hanging under the weight of the snow!

Gina left for work driving over the six inches of snow – normally not a good idea – in below zero temperatures that would turn the compacted snow into concrete hard layers that will ice-up and be very slippery and difficult to get off your driveway. BUR, with the very nice warm weather we are having these last two weeks, any compacted snow will just melt.

I went to the second storey window to take this photo of the Liloc standing right below that window – there was an inch of snow clinging to every small twig on that plant – and when I looked half an hour later – half of the branches of this twelve foot high liloc bush had fallen over! They weight was just too much – it broke off in the roots.

With the school closed because of the snow, the boys enjoyed playing outside and building snowmen and forts and having snowball fights – not often that they see snow this wet here in Minnesota!