[Truly, this photo does not show the near white-out conditions during the afternoon of Wednesday, February 10, 2010. It does show that as much as I wished to, I did not go out to refill feeders...]
I love the snow, but I do not enjoy living in fear of another power outage - and here at the house it was only out for a mere 16 hours on Sunday; thousands of places in the county are still without power today, Thursday. I can rough it if I have to and am prepared, but captive bred for generations or not, I worry about my "tropical" cage birds. And there are only just so many buckets and containers of water one can have stacked about waiting to be tripped over or fallen into... (Ah, the downside of a well – you need power to get the water out of it. And if you think I'd go out with a hand pump in this weather--! I'll trip over buckets, thank you.)
May we have just a little respite? Please? As much as I am enjoying the time off (or would be, if I didn't have a nasty head cold that is making me feel like a Nyquil commercial), I've already used up my allotment of snow days for 2010 and am making serious inroads into my personal days...
[This storm came from a slightly different direction than the others, and slopped up the glass doors on the south-facing deck.]
And I've the digging out to do all over again; trails I laboriously stomped out to the shed and around to the birdfeeders are mostly filled in. We gained another six or so inches of seriously blown-around snow yesterday - that after a few morning hours of pouring rain.
The snow is lovely, but with what has likely been the wettest year in a very long time, I worry where all the water will go when this frozen precipitation starts to melt. I’m greatly appreciative of our sandy "soil" during times like this, and I’m happy to have my officially designated wetlands back and (hopefully) to have a good recharge of the aquifers. (Alas, that all this wet was too late to stop that house from going up in that low spot out front a few years ago - their septic system is raised and the resultant runoff is the process of creating a new wetland right along my fenceline - or to save the few trees that succumbed to the droughts a couple summers back.) But the mass runoff will certainly cause many problems elsewhere in the county in the weeks to come… Although, given the size of the plowed piles all over the place and snow's insulative powers, we may be graced with a slower melt down than if we had had less snow.
(Speaking of flooding, I have finally posted the images from the aftermath of coastal flooding brought on by a November Nor’easter last fall… Scroll down through the blog to the bottom and click on Older Posts for them, or use the index at the top right of this page and select 2009. Woo-hoo, we've made it to Page 2!)
I do not consider myself a superstitious person, but I believe I’m going to take down that snowflake flag today.
Wren
