Snowbomb!

You may have heard we've had some weather up in these parts. Well, it's been an eventful week, and this was just the capper.

Actually, I'm not even supposed to be here. I was supposed to go to the telescope on Wednesday for a good, long nine night run under the Arizona skies. Being the cheapskate that I am, I was ever so proud that I had managed to snag a $300 round trip airfare, no less! (Note to my NSF program officer: note how efficient I am with my grant money!). But then, as we Case astronomers say, Schmidt happens. A little of this, a little of that, some nefarious assembler bugs here, some bad solder joints there, and I've got to postpone the trip at the last minute. Which means of course I'm playing right into the airline's hands. You need a change? Cha-ching! $100. Your new airfare? Cha-ching! an additional $500. So my cheap cheap cheap ticket just became a $900 boon to the airlines. Sigh. But you do what you have to, and I rebook to fly out on Sunday morning at 8:30 am.

Then Mama Nature steps in, and a winter storm comes screaming up from the south. On Friday, the snow starts to fly. The forecast looks downright nasty. A foot of snow perhaps, all set to pound away at Cleveland. It's supposed to finish early Sunday morning, just in time for me to try and fly to the observatory.

So I'm going to have to keep ahead of this sucker. No way I can dig out a foot of snow on Sunday morning. After dinner on Friday, I snowblow out the first round, maybe 4" or so. Saturday morning, I wake up, and there's another 5" on the ground, and I snowblow that off as well. And we're just gearing up for the day!


Now if you're a cat, who cares about all this snow stuff? You just lie curled up on the warm radiator while those dumb humans go out in that wet white stuff and get all huffy-puffy. So there was a round-robin of cats parked in the front window all day, watching me with disdain as I struggled mightily to clean the driveway and sidewalks.


But then by midafternoon, the beef of the storm was hitting us. By that time, it was parked over Cleveland and just rotating in place, bringing moisture off the lake and dumping it on us in classic lake effect snow style:


The airport shut down at noon, and was scheduled to reopen at 7:00am on Sunday, just in time for my flight! Raise your hand if you think I'm leaving on time in the morning. Yeah, me neither. So it's time to play. After I snowblew another 4" off the driveway, Brenna and I dragged the girls out of the TV room and threw them into the snow.




Brenna got into the action, and we all had a snowball fight:


And then all the women made snow angels:


Of course, we took Wacko out with us -- he loves the snow. Each time I went out to snowblow, I would tie him up in the yard, and he would lie on the snowbank getting whiter and whiter. And when I finished, did he want to go in? No way, he always wanted to go on a walk afterwards. By this time, the snow is up to his shoulder, but still he would bound through the snow, jumping up through it in front of me like a porpoise leading a boat.


Snowdog:


So at 5pm I grab a shovel and start clearing the couple more inches of snow that has fallen while we've been playing. It's a lot of snow in total -- I'm guessing 14", maybe -- and the house looks beautiful:


And the girls help me shovel the front sidewalk, too:


So after dinner, I log into my Continental account to check the flight status and see that the airline has actually already rebooked me on a later flight.

ON TUESDAY!

Well, nuts to that. I have to come back on Thursday anyway, what's the point of leaving for one day of work out there? So I call the airline and cancel the whole shebang. No trip to the observatory for me this time, but at least I get this crazy $800 airfare refunded! (A piece of me was just dying inside over having to pay that fare....).

My apologies to Paul, who is now alone at the telescope. But now I'm inside, snug as a bug in a rug, drinking hot chocolate and contemplating what I'm going to do with the girls in the snow tomorrow. Sledding sounds good....

(Update: the airport reported 15" of snow from this storm, and we usually get more than the airport does.)