Welcome to Hell. Here's your snow shovel.

In Hell it's Valentine's Day every day, the day when the world laughs at the pain you feel in being alone.  In Hell the job that you have to have tantalizes you with enough vacation time to imagine being able to do something really wonderful, and then forces you to waste your vacation days on days you can't get to work because the roads are impassable.

There's roughly a foot of snow around here, but the blizzard winds have piled it much deeper in some places, and packed it down so that instead of being nice and fluffy it's almost solid enough to walk on top, and much harder to move.  I did take the camera out and take some pictures of the snow sculptures; we'll eventually see how they look.  I need to get back to shoveling so that I have some hope of getting my car out, assuming that the lane ever gets plowed.  My neighbors report that someone is supposed to be by with a backhoe, and at least for the drift at the end of the lane it will be needed.

And just to make me feel extra special, they're saying we're going to get ANOTHER storm over the weekend, which may mean I won't be able to get to my tigers on Sunday.

Progress

Thanks to the good offices of a neighbor with a plow blade on his full-sized pickup, my driveway is now clear.  But the drifts on the lane are too much for the pickup; he got stuck and had to call for a tractor to pull him out.  We'll see if the backhoe that we need to clear the lane actually shows up.  Perhaps it will actually be possible to go to work tomorrow.

On the dog front, Meg seems to have decided that snow isn't so terrible after all.  She's been outside most of the day, and actually staying in the yard rather than just waiting in the dog room to be let in.  She's tromped out a path to the edge of the yard where she usually hangs out.  She wanted to come in with me just now, but she wanted to go outside again after a couple of minutes.  It's sunny and there's a lot less wind today, so it seems a lot less cold even though the thermometer reading is lower; perhaps that has something to do with it.