Re: Snow

Memo
From: Me
To: The weather

Please stop with the goddamned snow immediately. There's no place left to put it.

Thank you.

Daylight!

Just now I was trying to figure out what time tonight our latest wintry-mix-turning-to-snow storm is going to start and I discovered that I have made it to the darkest afternoons of the year. Sunset is supposed to occur at 4:23 for the rest of this week, and then on Sunday it will be at 4:24. Woohoo! It will continue to be dark later in the mornings, but I don't care so much about that because it's always light out by the time I walk to work.

And while I'm on a related subject - the high temperatures here haven't been above 30 degrees for more than one or two days since Thanksgiving. In fact one morning when I left for work it was supposedly -5! Since I was expecting to freeze my ass off and couldn't find my face mask anywhere I decided to compensate by wearing a hoodie under my jacket with its fleece liner. Then I wore a hat, my hoodie hood, and my jacket hood. I should mention that this was also the day after I got myself boots because of the incessant snow, so my feet were not losing as much heat as I was used to either. Needless to say I stayed toasty. In fact I felt slightly sick upon reaching work because I had overheated and dehydrated from sweating. So now I'm almost looking forward to February because I want to see how cold it has to get before the above layering scheme fails to prevent me from freezing. My guess is that I'll be fine down to the -20s as long as I can insulate myself from the wind.

In which the protagonist realizes she hasn't been to the gym in six months

We got around four inches of very heavy, icy snow this weekend. Of course, in some places (like my driveway) it was considerably deeper. Also, in some places (like my driveway) it fell on top of six inch piles of leaves (which our property management company was supposed to deal with... but didn't). If you've never tried shoveling snow that's fallen onto a pile of leaves, you have no idea how much fun your missing. The snow gets in between the leaves which become wet and stick together and then getting a shovel to go through the whole mess is practically impossible. I think it took me slightly more than an hour to shovel out most of the snow/ice/leaf crap from the side of one of cars in the driveway (an area about four feet long and two feet wide). It was also fun because the neighbors driveway is immediately next to ours, and the house is on the other side so there's no good place to put the snow without carrying it all the way around to the front of the house. Gah. So now my back and shoulders are really angry.