Scrabble, Seriously

Anyone who knows me even casually probably knows that I love to play Scrabble. Consequently, I instilled a love of the game in my children from a young age. Now that they are young adults, we still play, but there is one significant difference. They beat me! All the time! We always have good, competitive games though, so I keep coming back for more. [I like to think I give them a run for their money. I may be being naive.]

A few nights ago, Chris and I played a game of Scrabble and he beat me good. We both managed to play a 7-letter word, but he got two of them! And so, he racked up an amazing score of 425 to my paltry 294. I memorialized the event by taking a picture.

Maybe I'll do better next time. . . . Or not.

More Blizzard Photos

Here are some additional photos of our blizzard conditions:

The first is of our driveway and shows Katherine's car all covered in snow. It is difficult to see, but we have not finished all of our shoveling. The area in front of Chris' garage door remains un-shoveled. We'll have to attack that tomorrow.

The second photo here is of our two puppies, Bingley and Darcy. They are shown here in the morning, right after we had opened the garage

door. They probably thought they were going out to address their morning toilette, but no-o-o.

They encountered a bit of an obstacle - a wall of snow that

was taller than they are. Needless to say, they had to "hold it" for a while.

And the remaining pictures here are provided to try to give you a better sense of the depth of the snow. The first shows a flower box on the rail of our rear deck. This flower box is about

5 inches tall. You can see here that the height of the snow on top of the box is about 3 times the height of the box.

The final picture here is of the patio table that sits on our back patio.

The diameter of this table is about 60 inches. My best estimate is that there are 2 feet of snow piled up on this table.

The Blizzard of 2010

In my own humble opinion, weathermen usually err on the side of being overly pessimistic - in other words, predicting the worst. Well, they missed this one by a mile. For several days, we have been warned that we were to get a big snow storm on Friday night. The predicted snowfall was 4 to 8 inches. Well, they missed that prediction by about 300% - or more.

The snow began to fall slow but steady at about 6:00pm. It started out wet and slushy, solidified a bit, and then began to come down fast and furious. After dinner, Chris and I went out and shoveled about 6 inches off the driveway and sidewalk. We were feeling pretty good that we'd gotten a jump on it. Two hours later, I took the dogs out, and 4 more inches had fallen!!! I shoveled a path to get the dogs to the side yard, but figured it wasn't worth much more effort at 11:00pm.

This morning, we awoke to a true winter wonderland. Because this was also a windy storm,

there was a lot of drifting. We took a measuring stick and began to measure the depth of

the snow. Our first measurement, on the front stoop, was 17". But in parts of the driveway, it was over 2 feet!

It's noon time now and we've shoveling for about three hours. It's a nasty task. Chris is still out there, but I had to take a break. We have almost broken through the end of the driveway but, there, our biggest

challenge awaits -- a 3-4 foot high mound left by the snow plow.

The dogs always have the toughest time in the snow, and this snow is really confusing them -- because they can't see over it! I was willing to let them stay out with us while we shoveled, but they were not interested. [Have I mentioned, they are very intelligent dogs.] They were thoroughly confused because they can't get through it and they can't see what's going on. Bingley seemed stressed out by the whole scene! Darcy was a bit more oblivious, per usual.

I took a few pictures (some of which are posted here) but the pictures (white on white) do not tell the story well. There is no real depth perception in them. But you can believe me. We have a lot of snow!

is no real depth perception.