Fresh snow at the Aerie

Hey Rev. Paul! We gotcher snow right cheer, pal!

Woke up this morning to find that the snow fairy had visited again. THIS time the little imp dropped a fresh blanket of 4-5 inches on the ground. Now that's not much, I know, but it is an annoyance. The temperature had also dropped overnight and a reading of 13 degrees appeared on the digital screen. Even though the sun would come out, that temperature would not get out of the teens all day and a strong wind (18-20 mph) with even stronger gusts (28-30 mph) would put a little nip in the air. Add the occasional snow flurry/squall and you've got fireplace weather.

But first I had to clear the driveway. Do I shovel or do I use the snow thrower? Usually I opt for the shovel for anything under 4 inches and the thrower for anything over 6 inches. This snowfall was a tweener.

I chose the snow thrower since getting that much snow the 30-40 feet from the center of the parking area in front of the garage to the sides would be a task by shovel. Luckily the snow was dry and light so even though it got tossed on top of itself in an overlapping manner before getting to the edge, it never really packed down enough to force the thrower to complain.

The job of cleaning the driveway took just about one hour.

We've now had 3-4 shoveling snowfalls and 2 snow thrower snowfalls in the last two+ weeks and it's finally caught up with me. I've been trying to get the drive cleared as close to the ground as possible but today I threw my hands in the air and said enough is enough. Rather than go back over the entire expanse with a shovel after the snow thrower had done its thing, I chose to leave a half inch to an inch of snow on the drive. Yeah, it'll get packed down by vehicles and feet. And, yeah, it's likely to turn into a layer of ice. But tough! Perhaps it will actually help when the next snowfall arrives later this week. The shovel and the runners on the thrower will have a packed surface to glide over instead of jutting gravel stones on which to get snagged.

At least that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

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I see that the chief Long Term Forecaster at AccuHunch, Joe Bastardi, is saying that the weather patterns we've been experiencing (some snow every couple of days and cold temperatures) are probably going to continue through February into early March.
*sigh*