From 0º0'0" to 44º08'59"

What a change from being at the equator on Thursday afternoon where it is an 'eternal spring' to Vermont where we are buried in snow.


So here is what the front yard looked like on Sunday morning when I finally got back from Quito. Apparently, the town got three feet of snow while I was gone. We are on track to have one of the snowiest winters in the past 100 years and are already 30" ahead of where we should be right now.


The driveway was totally impassable because the snow plow guy said he no longer had anywhere to push the snow.

So here's where we enter into the Sisyphus files.



This morning I knew that I had to tackle the driveway before the temperature dropped (it got up to 50 this afternoon).

As I was shovelling out the two-thirds of the driveway that lead to the back, I went to the office to discover that the ceiling was leaking again. So off to rake the snow off the roof which meant pruning the white lilac by the office. The snow in the corner is so high that I could climb up it and bang on the ice with a sledge hammer. I was able to get the ice and snow off the parish house without having to go up top. Then, the shed roof dumped this afternoon so it was back out. I am pooped. But, hey, I am doing this activity at 800 feet, not 9200 feet, above sea level!


The Junior Warden is standing where I had been previously. Note our implements for getting rid of ice dams and snow from the roof: hammer, sledge hammer, roof rake (if you look really hard you can see it in the air), pruning cutters, snow shovels, crampons. It was so warm that both of us were in t-shirts.

The smartest idea I had all day was to go to the hardware store to buy a long-handled gravel shovel. It works really well for getting the heavy snow (such as the roof dump) out of the way — I can hack into the snow and then once it's on the blade fling it off to the sides.