My Public Apology

I would just like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Joel Nichols, Gary Lezak, Bryan Busby, whoever does the Journal-World weather, and the whole darn team at Weather.com. Several days ago, when they predicted that we would have 6-8 inches of snow on or around Christmas, I completely poo-pooed their forecast. I did not believe for a minute that we would have any significant snowfall here in Lawrence, since in the 15+ years we've lived here, we've rarely had more than a couple of inches. I was completely wrong, and the weathermen and weatherwomen were completely right. I'm sorry to all of them for doubting their expertise!!

Seriously though, I can't even believe how much snow we've had! It started snowing soon after my first post on Christmas Eve, and it had snowed so much by the end of the day and was blowing so darn hard that every Christmas Eve church service in the city was canceled. It was still snowing pretty hard when we went to bed around midnight, and the blizzard winds continued throughout the night. All I could think when I woke up Christmas morning was "how am I going to get the dogs outside to potty in this mess?"

Thankfully, the drift on the back deck didn't form right up against the door, so the dogs had a little space to walk through and only a small drift to jump over to get to the stairs. I actually shot video of the event thinking it was going to be funny, but the only funny part about it was Hope balking about going outside entirely. She absolutely hates the cold and snow.

I have to say that while it was miserably cold and windy outside during all this, I absolutely loved having a white Christmas. I'm sure many people will hate me for saying so since they were trying to travel to see loved ones for the holiday, but since we'd already celebrated with all of our family members, we had no place to go and were totally happy! The more it snowed, the happier I was! We laid around the house and relaxed and watched movies and read and blogged and it was wonderful!

After being holed up for two full days, we were ready to get out of the house for a while on Saturday. We anticipated just driving over the snow covered driveway with our 4-wheel drive until Chad opened the garage door to find a huge undrivable drift. Although we'd probably only had 6 inches or so of snow, the snow was 27 inches at its highest point! Poor Chad spent over an hour shoveling just one half of the driveway so we could get out, and much to his dismay, by the time he was done it was snowing pretty hard again! It snowed off and on most of the day, and after we got home he took another hour and a half to shovel the other half of the driveway and the walk.

While we were out and about, we were kind of shocked at how horrible the roads were all over town. It looked like the snow plows had been through overnight, but there had been more snow after the plows, which hadn't really gotten much of the snow moved in the first place! There were cars stranded all over the place. Right on our own street a car had gotten stuck and been plowed into a 6 foot snow bank, blocking all but one thin lane of the road. Another car was stranded just around the corner on Bob Billings.The roads were a combination of packed snow, ice and fresh powder, so the hills out by our house were pretty treacherous! Today the sun came out a little bit, which meant that much of it turned to slush, which wasn't much better. Hopefully when the work week starts tomorrow the road crews will get out and get some more plowing and salting done.

Quite honestly, even though driving around town is a little difficult, I wouldn't mind if another big storm hit us tomorrow and snowed us in for another two days. All the laying around the house has gotten me really spoiled and I'm really not ready to go back to work!