Ol' Man Winter

So after "complaining" about an especially mild and snowless winter the temperatures decided to drop and the snow started to fall. Last weekend we got a crap load of snow...I think Rochester got a total of 13.5 inches over the weekend. Winona (about 60 miles SE of us?) got 29.5 inches. Holy crap!!! Our total was a bit lower as the initial precipitation was in the form of sleet and freezing rain. We had like 2 inches of ice on the ground. Now, as I'm typing, the snow is pooring down yet again and the winds are picking up. We're under another Winter Storm Warning until Friday afternoon or so, with another 8-12 inches possible here. Rochester is in an ambiguous zone as the temperature will be hovering around freezing...so our snow total will depend upon how much of the precipitation comes in the form of rain/sleet/snow. Anyway.

I'm putting a few pictures up that I took in the "aftermath" of this last winter storm. The first is a picture of a cardinal sitting on a birdfeeder hanging in our backyard. It's actually a pretty self-explanatory picture. I just thought it was pretty.
The other day I really had an urge to build a snowman since the snow we got was perfect snowman snow. I didn't feel like trudging around in the yard, but I noticed that our deck had a nice layering of snow on it. So I decided to build a snowman on our deck. There was so much snow that I swear I rolled the initial ball across the deck once and it was friggin' huge. I then rolled the second ball for the snowman. I then tried to pick it up, but there was no way in hell I could pick it up. I tried rolling it up on top the other one. Nope. The snow was too friggin' heavy. Crap. So that became the base for another snowman. I had to make the rest of the balls by rolling a more manageable sized ball, putting it on the base, then manually sticking clumps of snow around it to make it bigger. It was a very time-consuming process. After making these two large snowmen, you could hardly tell any of the snow on the deck was gone. It was a lot of snow. I was quite happy with the results. I didn't have enough charcoal to use it for the eyes and mouth on both of them (plus, the snow was so hard-packed it was near impossible to jab them into the snow) so I used blue food coloring for the mouths. Which looked fine initially, but as of today it now just looks like their entire head is blue. Whatever. I also only had carrot sticks, not whole carrots. Plus, I had no twigs for arms, so I used skewers and stuck mittens on the ends of them.
I then noticed that a clump of snow must have rolled down the deck stairs...because at the bottom of the stairs there was a big wheel of snow...with a trail leading up to the top of the deck. I just thought it was really funny that this wheel of snow formed of its own volition. It reminded me of cartoons when a snowball rolls down a hill and gathers mass until it's this huge gigantic snowball that takes a bunch of people out. So I included a picture of it.

Hmm, there's a temporary respite in the falling snow...