Dog Day
Who's as happy as a dog in snow?
Fox29 - for coming closest on the storm that blanketed the region over the weekend.
The TV station's meteorologists forecast called for snow starting between 3 and 5 p.m. Saturday and piling up nine to 14 inches.
The official count: The Nor'easter started at 3 p.m. and dumped a foot.
Philadelphia Weather, the blog that's been tracking the storm trackers all winter, posts the latest results here.
Pictured above - Twinkle, our 75-pound Bouvier (we inherited the name when adopting her). She grew up on a farm outside Chicago, so this retrieves some good old memories for her.
What to play while shoveling?
Matt Pond PA's "Snow Day?"
Galaxie 500's "Listen, The Snow Is Falling?" Or Ray Charles's "The Snow is Falling?" The MP3 blog that calls itself Two and 1/2 Pounds of Bacon is serving up those seasonal chestnuts. Badminton Stamps picks "Velvet Snow," by Kings of Leon.
Digging out took a couple hours, with the help of a 16-year-old who managed to get more snow in his clothes than off the driveway. I buried the yardstick about 13 inches into the accumulation by the front door - closer to a foot and a half by the end of the walkway.
Coeruleus has come up with a new unit of measurement:
Snowfall was an impressive 3 or 4 inches per hour overnight. And it must have done that for quite a while because it wasn't sticking at 1:00AM, but there was about a foot outside at 8:00AM. But what's actually more impressive to me is the hours of newscoverage per inch of snow. Sometime around 4:00PM or so Glen "Hurricane" Schwartz came on TV and coverage has been non-stop without an end in sight. The rate as it stands right now (at 11:00AM) is somewhere around 1.58 hours of coverage per inch of snow. Anything else going on in the world?
"A slow-moving Eakins painting...," wrote All Aglow. "I am feeling overcome with a childlike urge to go out & build snow women and igloos as I watch the drifting flakes through the window pane. Where are my gloves???"
Sherri W. at Metroblogging had a good seat for some street theater - two guys trying to extricate a car out of its parking space:
It was a small car, with rear wheel drive, as far as I could tell by observing the futile wheel spinning and sliding that was going on. They were making slow progress, basically by having Guy 1 inside the car manning the gas pedal and steering wheel, while Guy 2 pushed alternately on the rear (for momentum) and sides (for direction) of the trunk.
I'll admit to a significant feeling of relief that my car was not parallel-parked on my block, because when Guys 1 & 2 began to achieve "forward" motion, it was with repeated slides towards the row of parked cars.
But funniest of all was when a Liberty cab came upon my block and the driver decided he just had to help. (Here I come to save the day!) He carefully positioned his cab behind the rear bumper of the original car, as if to push it forward with more power and less effort than Guy 2 had needed to use.
Except---and didn't you all see this coming, what with the crappy quality of car that most cab companies own?---the cab's wheels started spinning and now we had two cars stuck outside my front door where there had only been one car stuck before.
I almost made myself a big bag of popcorn to watch the show.
Pesky'Apostrophe, in a post titled, "I am traumatized by shovels," weighed the virtues of snow blowers and neighborhood kids.
most places around here have this rule - you need to get your sidewalks cleared within 24-48 hours of the end of the snow or face fines. Plus, since I have to walk on the sidewalks every day to catch the train and I get really pissed off if people are too #$%& lazy to shovel their walks [which makes walking sort of treacherous for me]...I insist that our sidewalks are a pleasure to walk on after a snow storm. And I suspect if we didn't shovel our driveway, Mr. Fish's vehicle would likely slide backwards down the driveway and into our neighbor's house across the street. All pretty good reasons, no?
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