The Blizzard
Colorado Springs never ceases to amuse me. Yesterday, as many of you know, we got a bit of snow. Quite a bit actually. They closed all highways out of Colorado by noon, and by 7 o'clock they closed all roads in Colorado Springs to anything but emergency vehicles and volunteer emergency vehicles (any one with big four wheel drive truck with chains). I find it kind of amusing that the city would ask for volunteer emergency vehicles although it is understandable when the news also reported that they were back logged with 100 emergency calls. Fortunately I didn't have to work and wasted all day in front of the TV/Computer. I did manage to snow board to the end of the street, I was think of trying to make it to the convenience store, but the temp was -17 with wind-chill and One block was more than enough. Was kinda fun though... it's not everyday you can snowboard down the middle of a major street :)
I woke up this morning early, partly because I knew that would have to shovel the drive way and partly because I forgot it was daylight savings today (don't forget to change your clocks) And was greeted with about 30 ft of drive way covered in 3-4 feet of snow. Oh fun... It took me 3 hours with the help of my Brother and mom to dig my way to the road... in shorts. Yes, that's right... I was out in shorts in 4 feet of snow. Well, as much snow as there was, it was a perfect day. No clouds and sunny... about 50 degrees. As long as I didn't walk through the snow banks it was fine. I started off in a coat and snow pants but figured out that it was way to hot, especially if I'm going to be doing heavy labor (hey, anything that involves lifting something other than food is heavy labor, Ok?)
The drive to work was an adventure to say the least. As I left I said to myself 'Stay to the major roads, nothing else is plowed', and immediately fell into my habit of driving my usual route, down a back road with lots of hills. It wasn't too bad really, once you learned to drive exactly where the rest of the car had made tire tracks and made sure to dodge the random scattering of abandoned vehicles. That in itself was a challenge because of the sheer number of vehicles that had been discarded. Mainly small cars but a few 4 wheel drive vehicles as well as one snowplow.... yes, a snowplow... Apparently it got in over it's head (or tires) and was among the stuck on the side or in the middle of the road (occasionally facing the wrong direction on the side of the road and sideways on the median). Only took me an hour to get where I abandoned my car on the side of the road. Ha, it's not as bad as it seems, they hadn't plowed the parking lot yet at work so everyone had to leave there cars about 10 minutes away. It was a nice walk anyway, by this time I was in jeans and it was still warm and sunny.
The thing that strikes me as really odd is that by 10am this morning, everyone was outside. We even talked to strangers (like the next door neighbor who has lived next to us for 5 years) Seems that the snow got everyone out doors either playing, shoveling, pushing, talking, walking, or cross country skiing (a much better idea than snowboarding at the time, going up hill is a pain in the butt) I saw more people out today than I normally do in the middle of summer. (incidentally, it was just our driveway that was that deep, most of the area averaged closer to 2 feet of snow but because of our fence it just created a snow drift. Also, there were parts of Colorado that got 4 feet of snow with drifts of 10ft, so 2 feet of snow isn't bad)