Meandering Thoughts

I enter a lot of contests and I’ve won twice before from Martha Stewart so I got a little excited when I found an email from her in my Hotmail junk folder. Here's the subject line - "You've been selected for the Martha Stewart's Dinner at Home Giveaway" Wow, right? So I marked it as 'not' junk and hurried to open it. It was just a magazine promo wanting me to refer friends for a CHANCE to win a book and tote. You know, it’s just not right to get people’s hopes up like that.

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We had another 6” of snow Sunday night and Monday with very strong winds that caused blizzard conditions again. Not good but better than the ice storm we had last week. We were lucky that our electricity never went off but thousands of others were without for hours and even days. So far this is the 2nd snowiest winter on record and we still have several weeks of winter left. More snow is forecast for tomorrow. Wonder what’s next. The sun is shining today and it looks good but it’s only 20°. I was going to take some photos of the squirrels having breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the bird feeder but my camera batteries are dead.

Isn't this a nice paved road?  It's actually a gravel road paved with ice!

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I haven’t had a cold all winter and I usually get a bad one with a cough that lasts for weeks. I’ve been inhaling those wonderful, little clementines, at least 2 a day, and I’m sure the vitamin C has helped. I also run a vaporizer full-time in the house that is good for the houseplants and us. Jim and I went and got the H1N1 flu shots Saturday. There have been a couple of people locally who died from flu complications and I figure why take the chance.

Note to Mother Nature - ENOUGH ALREADY!

This is part of my front yard this afternoon.  There's a sidewalk going out to the road and I had shoveled once before this photo was taken, but it filled right back in.  The drifts on either side are about 4 feet high.  We were lucky that a neighbor came down and plowed out Jim's parking place across the road later. (His truck won't fit in the garage.)

We are having one of the worst winters in history here in central Iowa. In December we had about 2 feet of snow, which is a lot for us. Yesterday we got another 6” of light, fluffy snow and today the wind is blowing about 25 mph with gusts up to 40 or 45 mph and the snow is drifting high. The decision to cancel our schools was made last night and travel isn’t advised today because of drifting and poor visibility. Of course, that didn’t mean people didn’t go to work, including my hubby…no work, no pay.

Jim drives a 4-wheel-drive pickup but that doesn’t guarantee he’ll get where he’s going. He spun out coming down the river hill on the way home last night and barely kept it out of the ditch. Luckily, on-coming traffic was able to get out of his way and the guy behind him dropped back. It scared him badly and he was pretty upset when he did finally get home. He said the road was so snow covered, you couldn’t tell if you were on it or off.

Added to the snow and wind are very cold temperatures. Tonight’s windchills are going to be about –40°. Tomorrow night it’s supposed to get about –20° actual temperature. We’ve had it that low already this winter here on the river bottom so it will probably be colder here. The cold water at the kitchen sink has frozen up every night for about a week. The kitchen was added on and only has a crawl space under it. Winter is just a pain in the butt!