More Pittsburgh Winter

Punxutuwny Phil predicted last Tuesday that we will have six more weeks of winter. As if to prove him right, winter struck with its full fury Friday afternoon, hitting us with a heavy snow storm. By the time it was over Saturday afternoon, we had just under 24 inches of snow on the ground, making it the fourth biggest snow storm ever to hit this region since 1884, when the National Weather Service started keeping record. The blizzard of ‘93 was supposed to have been bigger, but this one seemed much worse to us. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headlined it as “Snowmageddon”, which is not far from truth. The entire mid-Atlantic region was completely shut down by this one. Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, all were under a heavy blanket of snow, with planes, trains, and automobiles, all grinding to a halt. The outside temperature on Sunday morning was 1 degree Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Centigrade). Semahat and I decided to start digging ourselves out of this in the early afternoon, when the temperature rose up to a balmy 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 degrees C). We had trouble figuring out how to use our snow blower effectively, because the snow was too high. Just when we got the hang of it, we realized that there was very little gasoline left. With the help of the neighborhood kid Max, who showed up with his shovel looking to make some extra money, we opened up one lane of the driveway, wide enough for Semahat to get her car out the next morning to go to work. In the evening, we got the fireplace going and watched the Super Bowl, the biggest American sporting event of the year, with the underdog New Orleans Saints beating the Indianapolis Colts in sunny and warm Miami, for their very first championship ever.

This morning, as I sipped my third cup of tea sitting at the kitchen table, the view outside was incredibly beautiful, with the sun shining brightly for a change on the glittering white snow. The deck behind the house and the pine tree in the backyard was

Our snow-covered deck and the pine tree in the backyard.

loaded down with snow. There were piles of snow on the roofs of houses, on tree branches, and on the sides of our street which was cleaned up yesterday. The birds were all on the cherry branches around the feeder, which I had restocked just before the snow started. It is nice to watch their feeding frenzy from the kitchen window. Unfortunately, another snow storm is heading our way tomorrow afternoon, so I have to drive down the hill and get some gasoline. We are definitely not done with the snow blower and the shovel yet this winter.

View of the Street from our snow-covered front porch.