first snow of winter

Winter came to North Dakota with a thud - well more of a whoosh and then a flump!

Snow came yesterday afternoon with high winds. Blizzard conditions ensued for pretty much the rest of the night. During the evening the wind started to gust up to 40-50 mph.

While we were eating our evening meal, the power started to blip off and back on again every so often. As the evening wore on the blips would start to be a couple of seconds then at 8:30 we lost power for about an hour.

Woke up in the morning to find that school was cancelled, and we had a waist high snow drift going all the way down the drive. I dug a trench through the snow to the roadside and then went back in and worked from home for the morning.

By lunchtime, the risk of more snow showers was pretty much gone and I started to shovel snow. After an hour and a half, all I had managed was to clear away the shallow drifts. I still had the big waist high drift to do. Time to call my father in law. He brought over his snow blower and an hour later he had the big drift cleared away too. It would not have been so hard if the bank of discarded snow at the side of the driveway was not taller than the outlet for his snow blower.

After all that I then tramped t work.