Our First Winter Storm! Part Two

In Part One of this particular blog series, we prepped for our first big winter storm, romped in the snow with the kiddos, and cuddled in front of the tv, watching football and waiting for the freezing rain to start.

Sh*t's getting frosty around these parts

By mid-afternoon on this particular Sunday in January, our sweet, poofy snowflakes had changed into freezing rain, which was a move in the wrong direction, at least by our standards.  Freezing rain is lame.  It's liquid rain, but since the air and ground temps are cold, it's remarkably chilly, and it solidifies on contact with the ground or whatever else it touches.  It makes everything frozen over and slick, and the added weight from the ice it creates can take down tree branches and power lines, leading to dangerous outages.

Brr!

After a few hours of rain, a short break opened up, and we took the opportunity to get the girls outside, which was a mistake.  While they handled the icy stairs okay, they really didn't like the snow that was randomly cascading off the roof of the house in fine sprays.

These happened without warning, and the girls did NOT enjoy them

Poor Aubie the truck is also not enjoying the freezing rain

After awhile, the rain turned back into snow, and (while this was preferable to rain) the additional snow piled on top of the layer of ice created a weird ground consistency.  You'd step off the porch, sink through two inches of snow, and hit a layer of ice; sometimes, you'd break through that into another soft layer of snow and sink again.  The dogs were not fans, and we didn't enjoy it much, either.

Taking advantage of a break in the snowfall to clear the front porch a bit

The snow continued as night fell, and we kept our lanterns close and our phones charged, in case the iced over power lines snapped and caused us to lose electricity.

Icicles forming on the patio furniture

We woke up on Monday morning to a true winter wonderland - thankfully, one where we still had use of electric heat and lights.  Most of the city of Richmond didn't lose power during this storm, and we feel extremely lucky for this to be the case.

The poor truck!  It's completely encased in ice

Time for more shoveling!

We have little steel clasps on our gates in the backyard (a secondary security measure,

so they don't swing open in high winds and let the dogs escape), but they'd all frozen shut.

I guess we'll find another winter option from now on (once they've defrosted enough for us to open them).

Ah, look at the cute little mound of snow atop the dog poo bucket.  Charming!

These two were like, we'll potty under the porch, thankyouverymuch

(they eventually got over that, but it took a solid 24 hours)

Tractor-cicles!

The weather station still mostly worked, although the wind speed sensors were frozen motionless

I took my turn shoveling out part of the driveway during my lunch break - that is quite the workout!

Chris did the line on the left (along with other spots on the drive/front walkway),

and that's my first line, on the right

Done for today!

My attentive husband kept a close eye on me from his office window:

Ready for more ice pictures?  Here we go!

Ice encrusted crepe myrtles

Six inches total!

We're taking bets on whether the rosemary lives through this...

Most of the icicles on the house were normal-sized, but not this scary a$$ one.

We are taking great pains not to be underneath that monster.

One of our downspouts - that outflow is an ice chunk

On Tuesday morning, I carefully dragged the trash can to the curb (trash was delayed by a day due to the hazardous road conditions), and when I opened the garage door, I saw that someone had made their way up our front walk overnight:

Coming in from the street...

...and making the turn toward the porch.

We assume this was a cat or dog or something of that sort (we've heard coyotes in the back acreage, but never seen them).  We know it wasn't a rabbit, because their prints look like this:

The trail cam you see on the tree up there showed us evidence although the front yard tracks were likely still a dog or cat, we do have other kiddos in the backyard...

What does the fox say?

He says he's cold!

We had a plan to head up to Lexington on Wednesday after work for a run to Costco and dinner at a nearby sushi joint, so on Tuesday, we also started assessing the state of the truck.  Our shoveling workouts focused on the driveway areas around the truck itself, and Chris scooped out as much snow as possible from the bed.

It took a few tries to get the tailgate open, but look - the lights are on!

The truck runs!

Two different areas around the house, both showing 6"

The Wednesday evening run north for a giant bag of dog food and a sushi dinner went great, and it was sunny most of Thursday.  This allowed us to shovel off most of the back patio (which had been a solid chunk of ice for the first part of the week) and put down ice melt on it, the back stairs, the driveway, and the front walk to hopefully keep things clear for the next few days - Winter Storm Cora was coming our way on Friday!  Our first winter in Kentucky is breaking us in properly, for sure!

Later!

Amy