Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Hazy Shade of Winter: Oklahoma 2011

Well, gentle readers, it seems that even moving to Oklahoma did not keep us from having to deal with major winter weather.  There is far less snow here than we usually had in New York, but under the snow is a layer of the Midwest's winter specialty: ice.  Also, it is extremely windy, so we have very high snow drifts.  This is Kenna this morning, ready to go out for the first time:


She refused to go any further than this:


I made her try again, but she was right back at the door one second later:


I finally got her to go out in the front yard, but she wasn't happy about it.  She hates snow blowing in her face and the winds are very high, so the poor thing was having trouble even walking around outside.  This is our front yard--the street is out there somewhere :


The garage--thankfully, the snow has been blowing in the opposite direction.  I was worried that I would have a wall of snow in front of the garage door, but it isn't too bad.


The driveway that I have to unearth (unsnow?) at some point:


The house:



The drifts are in the back yard, for the most part, and they keep getting taller:


On the right side, that little handle belongs to my Radio Flyer red wagon.  The rest of it is buried for now:


It looks like the snow is over at this point, although the wind is still blowing like crazy.  I haven't seen any snow plows yet; I imagine that they have enough on their hands just trying to keep the main roads clear of blowing snow and it's difficult to treat the layer of ice beneath with winds like this.  The sun is finally out, but it's not even 20 degrees (without wind chill), so I doubt the sun will do much to help the situation.

I really hope I don't have to dig myself out and drive to campus tomorrow--I tried to start shoveling the driveway, but that is useless because the snow just blows right back.  So, I can't really effectively shovel until the wind stops blowing, which won't be until the middle of the night and I would rather not be out there at 5 a.m. shoveling so that I can teach my 8:00 class.  We shall see...

2 comments:

Rosie Hawthorne said...

Hang in there. Rosie and Dixie send you happy thoughts.

Leah said...

So pretty! I'm jealous. All I want out of this winter is one freaking snow day. Damn groundhog predicted spring, too. (Although he also predicted the Steelers winning, so I'm OK with spring if he's also right about football.