Last Wednesday: A foot and a half of snow.
This Tuesday: about six inches of wet snow, followed by freezing rain that put a layer of ice over everything.
Last night and today - six or seven inches of snow
Later this weekend - temperatures predicted to drop to five or ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-10 to -23 Celsius), not counting windchill
Conclusion - Not a good time to become a new homeowner and not have a snowblower.
Showing posts with label snow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label snow. Show all posts
Friday, January 21, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
New Homeowner
Last Tuesday, I signed a stack of documents that made me a homeowner. It was originally supposed to be on Wednesday, but the closing date was moved up to Tuesday because a big snowstorm was coming on Wednesday. It's a good thing we moved the date to Tuesday, because the storm ended up dumping somewhere between 16 inches and 2 feet of snow on the area (varied by exact location).
I don't need to leave my current residence quite yet, so fortunately I can move by bits and pieces. The downside of this is that there will be a lot of shuttling between my old and new residences.
I didn't even try to get to the house on Wednesday. Work was closed, and nobody went out driving if they could avoid it.
On Thursday evening, after work, I performed my first task as a new homeowner - shoveling out paths to the doors. Perhaps I should have started in the morning before work, but I underestimated the size of the task. After almost three hours, I had cleared a path from the street to the front door, and a large part of the driveway and a second path from the driveway to the front door. I learned a few lessons from this:
1.) ALWAYS check my coat pockets to make sure I have my winter gloves and hat. I forgot them, so I did all of this shoveling with bare hands and earmuffs only. Fortunately, it was cold but not windy.
2.) My new house requires a lot of snow removal. It has a relatively long, curved driveway, and a relatively long, curved path from the driveway to the front door. A second, shorter pathway from the front doorway to the street is recommended for access. One person with a shovel needs to do quite a bit of work to clear these paths.
3.) I must invest in a snowblower.
On Friday, I took delivery of my first pieces of furniture, a kitchen table and four chairs. I also learned from the mailman, who showed up shortly after the furniture movers left, that he puts the mail in a mail slit in the side door. This cleared up a bit of a mystery that I had forgotten to ask the previous owners about, but it also meant that I needed to shovel a third path, since the previous paths did not cover the side door.
On Saturday, my father and I got a small UHaul truck and moved a bunch of boxes and a couple of pieces of furniture, the only furniture that I am keeping.
Yesterday, I finally finished clearing the driveway, chipped ice that had formed on the paths to the doors, bought a bunch of cleaning and kitchen supplies, set up my desktop computer, and tried with limited success to figure out where various items in the boxes should go. (Being obsessive-compulsive, I sometimes get hung up over things like that.)
Today, I need to get some more supplies, bring a few more things, and re-assemble a couple of pieces of furniture. I'm pretty confident that there will be no shoveling today. Tomorrow, though, we're supposed to get a few more inches of snow.
Wednesday, I get a bed, table, and easy chair delivered - weather permitting, I assume.
Even with this going on, the most stressful aspect of my life for the past week, as it has been for the last 2 or 3 months, has not been anything going on outside, but rather my almost constant struggling with a very bad attack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I don't want to go into detail here, but it has been pretty severe and it has come at a very bad time. So far, though, I have been weathering the move, the OCD, and the weather itself.
I don't need to leave my current residence quite yet, so fortunately I can move by bits and pieces. The downside of this is that there will be a lot of shuttling between my old and new residences.
I didn't even try to get to the house on Wednesday. Work was closed, and nobody went out driving if they could avoid it.
On Thursday evening, after work, I performed my first task as a new homeowner - shoveling out paths to the doors. Perhaps I should have started in the morning before work, but I underestimated the size of the task. After almost three hours, I had cleared a path from the street to the front door, and a large part of the driveway and a second path from the driveway to the front door. I learned a few lessons from this:
1.) ALWAYS check my coat pockets to make sure I have my winter gloves and hat. I forgot them, so I did all of this shoveling with bare hands and earmuffs only. Fortunately, it was cold but not windy.
2.) My new house requires a lot of snow removal. It has a relatively long, curved driveway, and a relatively long, curved path from the driveway to the front door. A second, shorter pathway from the front doorway to the street is recommended for access. One person with a shovel needs to do quite a bit of work to clear these paths.
3.) I must invest in a snowblower.
On Friday, I took delivery of my first pieces of furniture, a kitchen table and four chairs. I also learned from the mailman, who showed up shortly after the furniture movers left, that he puts the mail in a mail slit in the side door. This cleared up a bit of a mystery that I had forgotten to ask the previous owners about, but it also meant that I needed to shovel a third path, since the previous paths did not cover the side door.
On Saturday, my father and I got a small UHaul truck and moved a bunch of boxes and a couple of pieces of furniture, the only furniture that I am keeping.
Yesterday, I finally finished clearing the driveway, chipped ice that had formed on the paths to the doors, bought a bunch of cleaning and kitchen supplies, set up my desktop computer, and tried with limited success to figure out where various items in the boxes should go. (Being obsessive-compulsive, I sometimes get hung up over things like that.)
Today, I need to get some more supplies, bring a few more things, and re-assemble a couple of pieces of furniture. I'm pretty confident that there will be no shoveling today. Tomorrow, though, we're supposed to get a few more inches of snow.
Wednesday, I get a bed, table, and easy chair delivered - weather permitting, I assume.
Even with this going on, the most stressful aspect of my life for the past week, as it has been for the last 2 or 3 months, has not been anything going on outside, but rather my almost constant struggling with a very bad attack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I don't want to go into detail here, but it has been pretty severe and it has come at a very bad time. So far, though, I have been weathering the move, the OCD, and the weather itself.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Drifting snow and a sunset
The snowstorm didn't dump as much on us as predicted, but it was still a lot of snow and wind. It stopped snowing this afternoon, but the wind was strong, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour (65 kilometers per hour). The sun peaked through the clouds, revealing the blowing snow:
Later, as the sun was about to set it shone over the drifting snow in the field behind the house:
Then the sun approached and dropped below the horizon, illuminating the clouds in various shades of yellow, orange, red, and purple as the light got fainter:
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Heavy snow coming
So far, it has been a very low-snow season. While other parts of the USA and Europe have been getting hit hard with lots of snow, we've gotten a total of maybe 2 inches, most of it a few days ago. Today and tomorrow, though, we are going to get pounded by a storm that is supposed to bring at least a foot and a half of snow (about .5 meters for you metric folk in the rest of the world). Hopefully we don't lose power - that's the only thing I worry about. It's supposed to be windy, too, so it will be a true blizzard.
Snow - beautiful to look at, a pain in the posterior if you have to do anything outside.
Snow - beautiful to look at, a pain in the posterior if you have to do anything outside.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
A slight change in the forecast
We were supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow today, and there were already a few inches on the ground was snowing when I woke up. I finished off my previous blog post, then ate breakfast and prepared to shower. I checked to see if there would be a delayed opening for my place of employment, and was surprised to find out that they would be closed for the day.
Then the snow changed to pure rain. Now we're forecast to get nothing but rain until late tonight. So, from my point of view, that whole calling work off for the day was probably not necessary. On the other hand, the majority of people who I work with come from points further west or north, and some of those areas are still getting snow, so it's very good for those people that they don't have to make their way into work.
That's one of the fun things about the weather where I live - when we have late winter storms like this one, we're often really close to the border between snow and rain, with rain to the south and east and snow to the north and west. The problem is that even with the best experts using the best technology, it seems to be basically impossible to predict where the rain/snow border will be to anything closer than 20 or 30 miles. You just have to wait for whatever happens - and pray that you get either rain or snow, and not the dreaded "wintry mix" of snow, sleet, and freezing rain together, otherwise known affectionately as "winter crap".
In any case, I'm not complainin'. This unexpected day off will give me the chance to procrastinate some mo ... I mean, finish all sorts of important tasks that I've been putting off!
Then the snow changed to pure rain. Now we're forecast to get nothing but rain until late tonight. So, from my point of view, that whole calling work off for the day was probably not necessary. On the other hand, the majority of people who I work with come from points further west or north, and some of those areas are still getting snow, so it's very good for those people that they don't have to make their way into work.
That's one of the fun things about the weather where I live - when we have late winter storms like this one, we're often really close to the border between snow and rain, with rain to the south and east and snow to the north and west. The problem is that even with the best experts using the best technology, it seems to be basically impossible to predict where the rain/snow border will be to anything closer than 20 or 30 miles. You just have to wait for whatever happens - and pray that you get either rain or snow, and not the dreaded "wintry mix" of snow, sleet, and freezing rain together, otherwise known affectionately as "winter crap".
In any case, I'm not complainin'. This unexpected day off will give me the chance to procrastinate some mo ... I mean, finish all sorts of important tasks that I've been putting off!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Let it snow
View out my bedroom window this morning- I loved snow as a child and missed it during a period where I lived in Louisiana.
- As I got older, snow became more of a burden and a lot less fun
- Unfortunately, it's not socially acceptable for a 34-year old man without kids to build snowforts or snowmen or throw snowballs around, so the stuff that I most enjoyed with snow as a kid is ruled out.
- Here in Massachusetts, snow often comes along with its siblings, sleet and freezing rain, which make life even more difficult than snow but with none of the side benefits.
- If only there were a way to keep the beauty of snow without all of the inconvenient part.
- Snow can be beautiful, but for my money it's not as beautiful as a good spring day.
A good spring day, by my reckoningSunday, October 18, 2009
Pics of autumn snow
It snowed again this afternoon - the extremely wet snow you get when the air is just slightly below freezing, where multiple flakes stick together into larger white clumps that look a little like bits of cotton falling, until they hit something warmer and melt in about one second. It's a little weird to have snow actually sticking to the ground when most of the trees still have most of their leaves, but most of it melted within a couple of hours even in areas where it did accumulate.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Snow coming early this year
We got a little wet snow here yesterday morning, and the forecast says we might get more tomorrow. It's still too warm for the snow to last long on the ground, but this is unusually early for a first snow around here. Some of the trees haven't even started to change color yet, let alone lose their leaves.
On an unrelated note, the mysterious inability to comment on some peoples' posts has returned, but now it has gone a step further. As of this morning, I can't comment in reply to MY OWN POSTS. (Deep breath -- I love computers, computers are our friends, I don't want to take an axe to my computer)
On an unrelated note, the mysterious inability to comment on some peoples' posts has returned, but now it has gone a step further. As of this morning, I can't comment in reply to MY OWN POSTS. (Deep breath -- I love computers, computers are our friends, I don't want to take an axe to my computer)
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