Snow day!

Wow... did the world end while I was asleep?

Once upon a time, the rule of thumb for my work was that if the county didn't call a Snow Emergency, the office wouldn't close.

Well, the county hasn't (yet) declared an emergency but I just called our emergency line at work and the office is closed. Just heard the Hamilton County Sheriff on TV, though, and he's anticipating that a snow emergency will be declared as the morning continues. Snow's actually not bad out yet, but it's wet and slick and we're expecting it to continue pretty much all day. The line for the blizzard warning is just barely north of my house, and the snow's starting to drift already. I'm extremely glad that this waited 'til we were safely home from Chicago before starting.

Woohoo! Last night I stocked up on smoked turkey and cheese so I've got sandwich fixiings. There's dogfood, catfood, and I bought extra cat litter ('cause being stuck at home with the cats and no way to clean the boxes would be _bad_). I'm going back to bed now...

The joys of facing south...

So the snow storm which has pretty much swallowed Indy... it blew in from the south. In fact, it's still blowing in from the south.

Which way does my house face?

South!

And what does that mean for the snow drifts?

They're deepest right outside my front door...

Thankfully only about six inches drifted all the way across the porch, so I was at least able to open the door when I finally decided to venture outside. The drifts just off the edge of the front porch are closer to 15-18" deep, and I gave up on the idea of shovelling the sidewalk. I shovelled the porch and cleared most of the first section of sidewalk (so that it doesn't all try to blow back onto the porch. Since it's 22 outside, with 17mph winds, it didn't take long for me to decide I'd been out in that for long enough! I opted to leave a small layer of snow on the sidewalk rather than taking it all the way down to the concrete, 'cause what's falling right now is the proverbial freezing rain and it'll be easier to hack my way through that later if it's lying on top of snow rather than frozen directly to the sidewalk. At least that's my theory...

I'm off to play in the snow with Drummer.

I may have to climb out a window in the morning...

At the rate the snow is blowing in, I may not be able to open the doors in the morning.

I wonder if "I can't get out of the house" will be considered a viable excuse if the office is open? :-)

(I've now shoveled the front porch three times and the sidewalk twice. You can't tell. I give up...)