Blizzard!

Two vehicles have passed my house this afternoon. One had 4-wheel drive. The other was a snowmobile. If anything else went by, it was lost from sight in the blowing snow. My photography skills and cold tolerance have made a real photo impossible, but it looks kind of like this:

Here's what the local weatherman said in his blog today:

There's no sugar coating it.  The next four to five days will be one of the most brutal stretches of winter weather many of us have ever seen.  There's two rounds of light snow.  Okay, we can handle that.  But, one of them will be a full-fledged blizzard.  Yuck.  An abrupt drop in temperatures from the low 20s to throwing a minus sign in front of that 20 by Monday morning.  Then we'll do it again Tuesday morning.  Still following what we have coming our way?  It's a lot.

First let's start about how this winter has gone so far.  There's no surprise it's one of the coldest we've seen in decades.  For Rochester, MN (the official climate station for SE Minnesota) the last time we started winter so cold was the 1983/84 season.  So far we've had 25 days reach subzero readings.  That puts us in the top ten for number of subzero days to start a season (Thru Jan 24)  In comparison, last winter had 12 for the entire season. 

Even though I was in Texas in 1983/84 I can attest to that winter also as Emily was born on the day in 1984 that Austin got SIX INCHES of snow. They even offered to let us stay an additional day in the hospital so the snow could melt.

I will share this photo of my parking lot, which I snapped upon my return from church:

If you're wondering - yes, that's a six-foot privacy fence behind those piles of snow. And the snow to the right of the big piles is the actual depth of the snow now. It' about knee-high on me.

Sunday morning I faced my first real work crisis. I had several Sunday School teachers who couldn't get into town to church because of snow, drifts, or unplowed roads. After fretting and worrying a bit, it all got sorted out, thanks to flexible and agreeable volunteers. However, this is a reality of my new job that I should probably spend some time thinking about.

All of this follows a wonderful couple of days off with my sister Laurie and my cousin Jane. It may be bleak outside, but inside there was lots of color. We made several of these fun box cards:

My WaterWings blog was added to First Lutheran's blog roll this week and I got lots of warm fuzzies from new readers at church. . . hmmm, that blog recurring references to water. This one seems to have an awful lot of warm and cold going on. I'll try to post next week with no mention of weather (but no promises when things are this dramatic!) Livin' la Frio Vida  in Minnesota!