Last week's blizzard...update

We made a fruitless effort to get to work last Thursday. We managed to get about 1 1/2 miles from the house before we got the beast pickup buried in the snow. After nearly two hours, we got it pulled out using my Suburban (much to my surprise - I figured we'd have to come back & get the tractor). That was enough to convince us both that it wasn't worth it to try to get to work!

The county then came out later that afternoon to begin clearing our roads. More accurately, they brought the road grader out in an attempt to plow a path through the drifts. They made two passes on what we call the "County Line Road" and we noticed the grader wasn't moving. The road is about a mile south of us, but we could still see him down there...not moving. R headed down there to see if he needed help. Sure enough, the county boy had the road grader stuck. How in the hell do you get a road grader stuck?? They ended up calling the neighbor and enlisting his help with a huge 4-wheel drive tractor. Between the tractor and R's pickup, they were able to pull the road grader out.

Mail delivery finally resumed for us on Tuesday of this week, after five days without. Guess that's not too bad considering how difficult it has been to get around. The roads are still terrible, probably six inches of snow & ice packed on the county roads. It has continued to drift in places since last week with the regular winds. R ran the old beast into a snowdrift coming home one night this week...buried it clear up to the hood. Ooops. Our neighbor took his big pickup down there to get R out. He basically has the same pickup, only much newer and shinier! I was glad he was able to help out - I was stuck in town and R would have had to wait about 2 hours for me to get there. Thank goodness we have awesome neighbors - all two of them!

Doesn't look like it's going to get better any time soon, either. Round 2 has started....

"We Ain't Going Nowhere, Ma!"

"We ain't going nowhere, ma". That's pretty much what R said when he finally got home this evening. We're having an early Christmas blizzard and it just keeps pounding us. I'd guess we have close to a foot of snow now, but when he came home, one of our roads had three foot drifts. It took him more than 30 minutes to travel just a few miles...and he was in the "big" pickup. The brute. The one we can always count on to get us around. The one that sometimes gets us in trouble because it takes us places we shouldn't be going. THAT pickup. Hmmm, so how in the hell am I going to get to work tomorrow?

I didn't take the chance of going in today and I'm worried about missing another day. One of my co-workers called this afternoon to see if she could hitch a ride with me tomorrow. She drives a Sunfire that has all of three inches of ground clearance. She's on my way and I'll be happy to take her *if* we're able to go.

Since I've talked to her, they've closed all but two roads in this half of the state. I didn't go to work partially because I was worried they would close the roads while I was there and I didn't want to get stuck in town. Figures they didn't shut down the roads until I would have already been on my way home. Now everything is shutting down, even the post office! I knew we wouldn't have mail delivery clear out here in the middle of nowhere, but to stop the postal service in the entire eastern half of the state? That doesn't happen every day.

Now I'm sitting here listening to the wind. It's been blowing all day, but not howling. This could be bad. Really bad. R's worried about the cows. Storms like this can be really hard on cattle. Thankfully we don't have any that are close to having calves. As long as *I* don't try to have my little calf early, we'll be in good shape!