Blizzard, Round 3 -- The Sucker Punch

This is the view from my front door right now. Whiteout conditions. The wind is howling and the snow is coming down fast. We're going nowhere for a long time. Go ahead, Arlington Public Schools, stop kidding yourselves that you might open this week. Cancel the rest of the week already. Your neighbors have.

We can't even get out and start shoveling. There would be no point. The wind would blow it all back. Moreover, the wind and the wind chills are too dangerous to go outside for any length of time now. So we sit and wait, hoping that the wind doesn't cause power outages.


That path was clear yesterday.


I cleared off the deck yesterday, fearing that the weight of the snow, plus all the new snow, would present a risk of collapse. Here's what it looks like now:


The other thing we've been dealing with is ice dams. The roofs of the house are in an M shape, with the dip in the middle where the original house and the addition meet. That dip is also right where the mudroom steps are. All the water on the roof gets shunted to that dip. We did a lot of landscaping and drainage work this summer to draw the rainwater away from the house (to keep our basement dry), but now, with the ice dams, we're in deep shit. The water is seeping down the outside of the house by the mudroom, freezing the steps into a solid block of ice. And then the water is going right into the basement, right into the cedar closets that house my stash. Luckily, all the yarn is up off the floor on shelving or in waterproof plastic, but it's still a giant pain in the ass. I pulled a lot of yarn out, we turned on fans, and then Mr. T and Sr. Jr. hacked away at the ice on the steps to try to alleviate the situation:





And you can see here, after we started chipping, that there was 2 inches of solid ice on the steps:



I threw birdseed out in the front and the back yards yesterday for the birds and squirrels, but it's all covered now.

The local states have pulled their plows and service vehicles off the street because conditions are too dangerous.

All the snow has not meant cozy days sitting in front of the fire, knitting. This is a lot of work. I did get a start on my Virve's Stockings, but I haven't gotten very far:


And tomorrow I get to try to walk to the supermarket to get more cat food!