The Decompression of a Boomer

The year 2017 blew in like the Abominable Snowman in southeast Idaho. The storms started for us about 10 days before Christmas.

Which, admittedly, the first major storm was magical. It whipped me out of my doldrums into the Christmas spirit

Our back yard, December 17, 2016

Let’s hang the stars in our upper story windows!

Poinsettias in the kitchen!

String the lights!

The 8 am, December 19th sunrise is surreal. Snow clings frigidly to every branch and limb.

But the real whopper of a storm hit on Christmas Day. Santy Claus had barely filled the stockings, scooted back up the chimney, and taken off on his sleigh when…

to our wondering ears we hear the scrape, scrape, scraping of a shovel. And who out of the dawning twilight should appear? David, with his frosty hair and jolly ol’ belly (just kidding, honey) …. shoveling.

8 am Christmas morn

With Rudy as his helpful reindeer

Let me in!

We open presents. Rudy is the youngest, so he goes first:

David shovels again about 11 am.

The snow starts piling up again…

1 o’clock PM!

Then David helps the neighbors, who are stuck (while I’m preoccupied with spying, alerting him as to the goings-on in the neighborhood, and taking photos, oh, and making Christmas dinner…)

Can’t you hear the whirring of the mixer? Wait a minute! That sounds like snowblowers. It’s our neighbors…

We don’t own a snowblower. Our trusty metal scoop will do. Uh, if you scoop the snow in shifts, after every couple of inches, before it gets too heavy. And, if you have extra strapping bodies to help during a blizzard. Like our son, Ben!

Ben shovels us out

Luckily, Ben and his girlfriend Rhonda are here from Boulder, Colorado, to spend Christmas with us. (Apparently, it’s still 50 degrees back in Boulder…)

So yeah. Idaho Falls was snowed in on Christmas. Our invited dinner guests cancelled on account of they couldn’t get out of their driveways either.

David was pretty tired by evening.

The thinker

The neighbor was at it again…

Then night fell…

The city got busy plowing the streets, first, shoving huge mounds of snow into tall ridges down the median.

Where’s my next left?

Then they suck the giant snow ridges up into a fleet of dump trucks and haul it all away. (To where, I wonder?)

Whoopee! By evening on Dec 27 the massive snow removal convoy comes roaring through our neighborhood.

As you can see, it’s still snowing. The snow removal crews work around the clock to plow all the streets. It’s an amazing feat, probably has already nearly bankrupted the city snow removal budget. No matter. The weather is clear today. Clear with a low of minus 23 and a high of 0. (Originally I thought it was minus 12 to a high of 5!)

So yeah, the snow isn’t melting. I took a photo of our front yard early this afternoon.

And the forecast? Snow flurries for the next five days.

Oh well. As I write this a severe winter storm is pummeling the southeastern USA from Texas to Virginia, affecting over 60 million people, stalling airports, stranding motorists, bringing as much as 9 inches of snow in parts of North Carolina. Read all about it in today’s USA Today. Well, that is, if you don’t live anywhere in America where there hasn’t been snow and can’t relate at all to the phenomenon of the Abominable Snowman that’s been tramping across America, ringing in the New Year…

Tags: Christmas 2016, Idaho falls snow removal operation, Southeast Idaho Christmas blizzard 2016

This entry was posted on January 6, 2017 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Christmas, Holidays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.