This is what half a foot of snow looks like

…from inside my own footprint.

It all started innocently enough… well, okay, not really. Buckets of sleet started pouring down on Friday morning. Schools started closing really, really fast, including Evan’s day care, and I slipped and slid all the way there and all the way back.

…and then a truckload of big, thick snow arrived.

At this point, getting off this hill was already off the table.

The snow kept coming even as the sun went down…

The view from the ground.

At this point, we were at about 2-3 inches of snow on the ground.

The slope of the driveway and the weight of the snow on the car led to at least one avalanche!

By morning… six inches of snow, and enough ice on the road that you can barely tell where the center line is. (Not that anyone’s bothering to observe the center line at this point, as the few tire tracks clearly show; they’re sticking to the middle of the road and trying to stay on it, and at least one car still wound up in the ditch at the bottom of this hill last night.) The past 24 hours have been punctuated by a lot of sirens, but as the night wore on, they stopped responding to every single accident and only showed up for injury accidents.

Not too many drivers have tried to brave the curve though…

The front yard, half a foot of snow later. (Most of the tracks are Xena’s – I think she probably came out to bark at passing wampas.)

The woods across from my house.

Looking back at the barn.

Icicles on the house. You can see the newly-installed back door here, and thank goodness it got here before this. We lost so much heat and/or air conditioning through the old back door… the past few weeks would’ve been much, much worse.

The stairs up to the back deck… well, I think they’re in there somewhere.

The deck railing is under here somewhere too.

Ice-over, snowed-over pond.

The back of the house.

To put it mildly, we don’t get this kind of weather every day, and though this area does get snow and ice on a yearly basis, they still don’t prepare for it. The road I live on is under the county’s watchful eye, rather than either of the nearby cities (Alma or Mountainburg). The joke I usually roll out is that our road is still covered in snow/ice because the state’s one snowplow is in another part of the state today. If you make that “county,” though, it’s probably not far from the truth.

I’m looking forward to actually being able to venture further than my own yard tomorrow.