Saturday, December 26, 2009

Northern Plains Christmas Blizzard 2009


Well, here we are in North Dakota experiencing a blizzard. That's nothing really newsworthy since we have at least one per winter. Before we moved to ND five years ago I'd never experienced a blizzard. Having grown up in the Northwest winter always consisted of lots and lots and lots of gray and gloomy rain.

The first ND blizzard was exciting. It was a good excuse to drink hot chocolate and sit by the heater as the wind and snow howled outside. It was cozy and dangerous at the same time.

This particular blizzard roared in late Christmas Eve and has been snowing for two days straight. We got about as much snow in 2 days as we did all winter last year.

Now, ordinarily I would still consider a Christmas blizzard to be a fun experience but I'm supposed to fly to Connecticut for my MFA residency on the 28th at 4:00 a.m. That's only a day and a half away and today the airport was closed completely. I'm suspicious about whether or not I'll be flying anywhere on Monday morning.

Here are some pix from today. When we went to bed last night we could open the front door. When we got up this morning there were about 8 inches of snow holding the door closed. We had to shove it partially open and then Hubby shoveled his way out the rest of the way.

This is the truck after the kids pulled the snow off the window.
This is the front yard. You can't really tell, but there's a good 2.5 feet out there.
This is the garage door all snowed in.

2 comments:

Bethany Wiggins said...

You poor, poor thing. My back aches at the thought of shoveling all that snow. When I was a teenager, we got nearly three feet of snow in two days. People strapped on their skis to get around, and we jumped off our roof into the snow for fun.

I hope your flight goes well.

Sherrinda Ketchersid said...

I hope you are able to get out of all that and make your flight. Looking at the pictures, though, it looks doubtful! If that happened in Texas, everything would shut down for weeks! It gets crazy here with just flurries! lol