Snow upon Snow upon More Snow...

We have had so much snow this winter. I heard on the news this area hasn't had this much snow since 1989. It was -45 degrees with the windchill one day last week. Skin freezes in 10 minutes in those temperatures. If you've never been lucky enough to feel temps that cold, when you walk outside your nose freezes inside and then thaws out when you come back in. It's a very weird sensation. We sure are getting broke into northern winters. The kids are having a lot of fun in the snow when its warm enough to play outside.

Here's Mr. Kalen with a very large snowball. We haven't had very many days that you can make a snowball. The snow has been too fine and fluffy and too cold to stick together. Arlen is making a big pile of snow to make a quinzhee. Here's a link to info of what a quinzhee is if you've never heard of it.

Gannon with the hoe. The sand toys are getting double duty because they are also making great snow toys.

Theya inside the finished quinzhee.

Arlen in the quinzhee with the kids around.


We've had so much snow that we had a huge pile all around the deck from shoveling it off every time. The kids are on the snow pile and level with the deck.

We have no way to plow our drive-way and we live a ways off the road. Arlen had to shovel the entire thing by hand and it took him about 6 hours. I'm standing at the house to take this picture of Arlen shoveling, if you can see him in the picture, he's quite small because he's almost to the end of the drive-way, he's got about 20 feet to go.

The next time it dumped a lot of snow, Arlen was able to keep getting out of the drive-way with 4 wheel drive but we couldn't get out in the van. Arlen really didn't want to shovel the entire drive-way again because it was even deeper this time. Then we found out you can purchase flags from the county office for $30 and have a county grader plow your drive-way. The day we found that out Arlen bought a flag and when he got home the grader driver was just at the corner so Arlen got his attention with the flag and he drove over and spent about 40 minutes doing a really good job of plowing the drive-way and parking area. Before he left we gave him a jar of homemade blackberry jam.

The boys were so excited. As soon as they saw the grader and the CAT logo on the side, they went and grabbed Kalen's CAT bulldozer he got from Christmas from Grandma and Grandpa. They sat at the window the entire time and watched.

The grader have three different blades they can use to push and move snow any which way.

It's hard to see in this picture. But that is an owl sitting on a fence post in the back yard. Look how high the snow is. He must have been watching for food because he hung around in the back yard on different fence posts for an hour.

There are mouse holes in the snow everywhere so I'm sure he eventually found something to eat.

It's finally snowman building weather (sort of). This is the best snowman the kids have been able to make so far this year.