Just joking. But given that it was 70 degrees in Boston this weekend and it took me two hoursto dig my car out to get into the office today, the thought cross my mind (several times.) The weather here is completely fubared.
We had a hurricane in our canyon in Eldorado Springs last night. Seriously. The winds topped 115 mph at 2am (that would be a category 3 hurricane for those of you following along at home.) Amy and I were pretty certain that we were going to end up in Kansas last night when we went to bed. We have a sculpture just outside our bedroom window called “The Vistors” – they are giant rocks on the top of 8 foot plus poles. I dreamed that one of them was blown through our bedroom window (floor to ceiling) last night. Thankfully, it was just a dream.
I woke up at 5am to no Internet (thanks Qwest.). At 7:30am, I got in my car to drive to the office (it’s a 15 minute drive on a bad day.) The main part of our road was completely windblown – it was mostly gravel – which was weird. I was pondering where all the snow had blown to as I went down the road and made the sharp left turn that heads down to our main road. The car abruptly stopped as I high centered myself in a two foot snow drift. Stuck. Completely. Going nowhere.
I got out and marched back to the house. Fortunately, my neighbors were coming down with snow shovels to dig out the road. I grabbed my snow showed and the three of us proceeds to spend the next 90 minutes shoveling 4000 cubic feet of snow. We managed to get my car down (after high centering it one more time.) I arrived at the office soaking wet (from snow and sweat) around 10am.
At least I got a good workout today. Packed snow (and you could make a nice igloo out of this stuff) is 481 kg / cubic meter. According to Google, this is 30.027849 pound / cubic foot. Given that we shoveled 4000 cubic feet, that would be (according to Microsoft Calculator) 120,111 pounds. It’s a little hard to believe that I just moved approximatly 40,000+ pounds of snow, but my back is telling me that I did. For perspective, a box of potatoes is about 50 pounds (if I remember correctly from my job in high school at Potatoes Etc.) That would be around 800 boxes of potates. Even if I’m off by a factor of two (ok – some of the showels weren’t completely full of snow bricks), that’s still a lot of potatoes.
It’s 50 degrees and the roads are wet (no snow – lots of snowmelt). I keep telling my California friends who moved here this summer that “this is atypical.” Whatever.