Snow Day!

In honor of my day off (and because I'm a weather geek...in life, there's not too much better than the promise of large amounts of snow), I kept a running diary of the day and the snow.

Prequel: The pictures below are from yesterday so you have a benchmark for the snow photo viewing.

6:40 am: Woke up hearing Elisabeth crying. Looked outside. Yes! It truly is snowing

7:11 am: Had to pee. Got out of bed and took care of business. Came downstairs to check the school closings. Salem State is closed…glad that I don’t have to drive in crazy weather today.

7:15 am: Mommy….mommy! Elisabeth comes downstairs.

8:00 am: Snow/sleet mix falling lightly. Took some pictures to document snow amounts. Opened the door briefly and got sleet in my hair. Rich and Elisabeth are in the kitchen while he makes breakfast.

9:45 am: Bacon and eggs for breakfast courtesy of Rich who also stayed home today. Still light snow/sleet mix going on. Too bad about the sleet as it will keep final snow totals down a bit. If only the low was 50 miles further east…then we would be all snow.

11:30 am: Elisabeth wakes up from her comfy bed on my lap. She’s not feeling well or something. Poor thing. Snow is continuing to fall…more snow than sleet now. Watching Alias at the moment…the scary Nocturne episode from Season 4.

1:36 pm: So far at KFIT 0.59” of liquid equivalent have fallen. If that was all snow it would probably be 6” or a little more but with the sleet mixed in, I’d say there’s about 4” on the ground currently. Winds are starting to pick up also which will make things interesting this afternoon!

2:41 pm: Highly recommend the California Pizza Kitchen barbeque chicken pizza. Yum-o. Sleet makes a cool sounds when it’s coming down. I brought some inside to melt. I don’t know why.

7:22 pm: Well after a long afternoon of an unhappy baby, she’s finally upstairs (notice I didn’t say sleeping…that could be another blog post about her sleep habits lately). Rich went outside around 6 to shovel the snleet (that’s my new word for snow+sleet). He was having a rough time since sleet is MUCH heavier than snow (higher water content in more compact form). He was working his way down the driveway when I looked outside and I swear, it looked like it was raining. So of course I had to investigate. I opened the door and stuck my head and arm outside. Sure enough, it was rain with a little sleet, and pretty heavy at that. It didn’t last too long and changed to snow after about 5 minutes. It was pretty wild. So then Rich is starting to run out of gas (which is funny if you know him at all) near the end of the driveway which is the hard part because that’s where the plow goes by. Across the street from us is a garage that the Fitchburg Housing Authority uses…on our street there are some public housing units for the elderly. Some guys had pulled up in their trucks and gotten out their snow-blowers. All of a sudden one of them starts wheeling his over to our driveway and tells Rich stand back. He proceeds to blow the snow (and I mean blow…the snow was ending up 50 feet from our house). It took him all of 5-6 minutes to take care of what would have taken Rich another 30-40 minutes. So thanks Mr. Snowblower man…you rock! (Rich overheard him saying he just got a new snowblower…I guess he was looking for another excuse to use his new toy!)

7:47 pm: Final snow totals won’t be available until tomorrow since it’s still snowing right now. Here’s what has been reported so far: 5.8” as of 2:13 pm. The liquid equivalent from KFIT ASOS as of 7 pm was 0.92”. I only wish I could have seen what would have happened if all that liquid fell as nice, powdery snow. Oh well! It was still a fun storm and I got a day off.