SNOW !!!!

Winter won't officially arrive until about noon tomorrow but it's definitely made it's presence known along the Chesapeake this weekend !

It started snowing about midnight Friday and didn't stop (at all!) until about 10 p.m. Saturday night. We've got 19" in our neighborhood. Communities around us have measured out anywhere from 17" right on up to about 23". This is NOT the norm in these parts. Someone forgot to tell Mother Nature we ARE south of the Mason-Dixon line.

The Mid-Atlantic does not deal well with snow. I, personally, do not do snow. I'd prefer not to do winter at all if the facts be told.

I "lucked out" and was sick all weekend. What a fantastic excuse not to go out and shovel!!! Since The Big Guy had breathed his germs on me earlier in the week sharing a nasty intestinal virus, he felt guilty and did not complain about that. Between he and the neighbors, they have our cul-de-sac in fairly decent shape and I should not have any trouble getting out today. Normally, I'd attempt to hibernate until it was gone but I do need to do one final Post Office run. All of my orders have gone out but I still have some family gift shipping to do at a high expense today.
This mass of white stuff wreaked havoc in my life more than one way. This was supposed to be "candy making" weekend. Since my help (read "family") has about a a 90 minute drive on country roads in good weather, they canceled out on me even before the first flake fell. (That was before I got sick.) I, obviously, understood this move and accepted the fact that I had 25 to 30 pounds of candy making ahead for me, alone. When I got sick Friday evening I realized that was out for the weekend, too. So, here I am, late Sunday night, still looking ahead to hours and hours of candy making.

Looks like, once again, I'll be making and packing candy on Christmas Eve! So much for planning. This production weekend was originally scheduled for four weeks ago and kept getting pushed back for one reason or another.

Want to know the real clincher in all this? They're predicting more snow for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We'll probably be stuck at home anyway with all these packages of candy and the gifts I've rushed to make and then won't have any way to deliver that day! (Our Christmas Day run involves about a 200 mile round-trip run with five stops.)

---------------
One of the interesting side notes about this snow storm was the work done to pull off the Ravens v. Bears football game at M&T Stadium in Baltimore.

A crew of 750 folks made up of ground crew staff, volunteers and work details from a near-by prison, hand shoveled 25 million pounds of snow from the stadium seating area !!! They started shoveling at 1 a.m. Saturday morning and finished just before game time at 4:15 Sunday. (The snow was hauled off and dumped in the bay. Before you panic about the state of the bay, this was clean snow.)

As there were a few areas that simply weren't cleared, folks whose assigned seats were still snow covered were allowed to find open seats elsewhere in the stadium. Late in the game, they showed a picture of some kids up in the Upper Deck who had created a large snowman in the seat next to them and put a Ravens hat on him. I guess they needed to do something to keep warm!

By the way, the Ravens won!
--------------- Well, we're guaranteed a white Christmas. This stuff isn't going anywhere as it won't be warm enough to melt by then.

Stay warm, my friends !!!