How Can Something So Beautiful Be So Very Vile?

Yesterday, school was canceled due to 3 inches of sleet. We had a snow day at home. We slept in, ate banana bread for breakfast, had hot chocolate with marshmallows and candy canes, watched too much television. We even played out in the sleet, but not for long as the stuff kept falling. It was messy and cold outside. I tried to shovel out the driveway, but it was rough going, and the sky kept dumping as much as I could clear up. The weather turned to rain around 10 pm, and then snow around 2 am.

School is canceled today, too. We wake to find beautiful, sunny skies, and 3 more inches of fluffy snow. Time to tackle driveway. We have pumpkin bread for breakfast (can you see I'm trying to conserve the milk here?), I ask the girls to get themselves dressed, and head out to start shoveling.

My cheap, plastic shovel can only tackle the top layer. Still, I figure, if I can get the top off, maybe I can work on the rest with salt. Besides, I have all day. I can chisel it out later this afternoon.

Two hours later, the girls decide they want to come outside and hinder join me. We make snow angels, sled down the hill, and play on the shoveled snow mountain (More pics on Facebook). They get cold and head inside. I keep shoveling. An hour later, they demand hot chocolate; I'm feeling overheated and starving, so I head inside.

I get sidetracked with tidying up and gabbing on the phone. Really, I just don't want to get out and shovel any more. It's depressing, it's slow, it's painful, and it's useless. Even after I get the layer of snow off, there's the thick layer of ice. It's like someone poured the contents of an entire sno-cone truck onto the driveway and then packed it down with an asphalt roller. Even if I can ski the van down this hill to the road, there's no way I'm going to make it back into the garage, or even over the foot-high snow berm the plows at the street.

Finally, I decide I need to at least get that snow layer off. Two more hours of shoveling and lots of thinking. Thinking how convenient it is that James is in the south Pacific, even if he's worried about a cyclone and getting very wet. Realizing that the only vehicles out and about are 4x4s. I'm very grumpy and my hip is starting to hurt. I take a break to hike down and check the mail, only to see that the mailman didn't deliver at all today, again. I chisel out a few token holes down to the pavement and sprinkle some ice, in hopes that somehow the patches will grow and make things easier tomorrow. Five hours of shoveling, and my lane looks like a mini version of the bunny hill at Sundance. All it needs is a tow rope. If I had a tow rope, maybe I could get the van up the lane, too.

James will be making a big purchase this fall. He will buy a snow blade for the tractor, or a Honda Pilot.