Blizzard!

We're getting enormous amounts of snow. It's been snowing for 3 straight weeks, and now we're experiencing our first blizzard of the winter. Everything's cancelled - work, school, basketball. People are X-country skiing to town!

You can't tell from the photo below but it's blowing snow like crazy, gusts over 30 mph, snowdrifts covering all the roads, visibility limited to 100 feet. In the picture below, that's about the three feet mark on my shovel along the driveway.

Here's what used to be our patio:

It's a high clearance, four-wheel drive, snow tire type of vehicle day. Lucky I've got just that, so we ran downtown to see the general traffic mayhem and let Annie stick her nose into a cup of cocoa:

The benefit of all this snow is that we have great snowpack in the mountains, so i doubt we even see a spark during fire season this year. Plus, the skiing is epic right now.