kareina

 My birthday snow is still here, and I am quite pleased! Temperatures are much better than last week, when it was above freezing all the time. 

However, as I walked out the door to head over there I saw a thing that was much higher on the priority list...

I mentioned in yesterday's post that one of our sheds had a mini avalanche yesterday while I was at work, but the debris pile hadn't yet frozen when I got home, and it only barley covered the path to the hot tub, so I dug it out promptly after I got home (eyeing the other shed roof, which isn't as steep, carefully as I did, since it would be embarrassing, not to mention painful and potentially fatal to get caught by snow coming off of one roof while cleaning away snow from the first).

I wound up staying up much too late last night, mostly goofing off on the computer after I finished shoveling, but also having a nice video call with my mother, who is looking great, despite having had ten very exciting days medically speaking. But she is now home at Amber's house in San Francisco and they plan on taking her back to Seattle on Saturday, and she is very happy to be out of the hospital. Not surprisingly, today was a rather slow day. I didn't sleep in as late as I expected (I woke after only 5.5 hours), but I did take it easy after getting up. During "business hours", I only did a couple of loads of laundry, did some reading in Swedish while listening to an audio book, mixed up a new batch of muesli (it has been nearly 4 months since last I needed to do that), checked email and FB, and replied to one work message.

Then I noticed that it was nearly 17:00, and Phire practice starts then, so I decided that I needed the exercise and ought to go. When I stepped out the door I realized that the little bit of snow that had fallen last night had melted on the previously exposed paving stones at the base of our steps, and, having no where to drain, created a small puddle. So, of course, I delayed leaving long enough to chop the ice at the edge of the paving stone to break a channel to the grass, and then used the push broom to encourage the water to drain.

As I was doing that I heard a sound from the second shed, and looked over on time to see it lose a small portion of its snow (only about 2 x 1 x 0.4 meters), and realized that the side of the roof that faces the morning sun had lost all of its snow over the course of today, and the side that faces the evening sun was in the process of losing it, a bit at a time. So I walked over an looked, and, sure enough, while most of the slabs of snow that had come down so far had landed well away from the path, a bit of it had fallen right into the path. Of course, there was still a fair bit of snow poised and ready to come down over the path. So I got a long stick and tried poking at the snow from a safe vantage point on the side of the shed, but nothing I did made a difference. Therefore I decided that it wasn't ready to come down, and I could start digging out the path again.

By "digging out the path" I mean "use the shovel to break a slab into smaller chunks, then use my hands to pick up the chunks and toss them aside". I was able to remove a fair bit by standing off to the side, where, if anything more came down, it wouldn't land on me, but, by the time it would have been necessary to stand in harm's way, the snow on that corner of the roof had glided partway down the roof. Where it had been flush with the roof edge when I started clearing, now it was hanging a good 40 cm past the roof edge. Not liking the look of that, I stepped well back, and started throwing snowballs at it, till it finally broke off, and I could resume clearing the path. Of course, that still left one final chunk of snow still attached, so I kept an eye on it, and when it had finally shifted in its turn till part of it was unsupported I once again retreated and tossed snow balls (well, more often small slabs of roof snow, since it didn't need any packing, but was already quite coherent and solid), till it finally gave way. Then I was able to get in and dig the path out properly:


(the view from the front)


(the view from behind)

Why do I even care about keeping that path open? It isn't like we are making frequent use of the Frostheim Hot Tub, which lives behind the sheds. However, having done all of the landscaping last summer to flatten the area behind the sheds and create drainage so that we don't get a lake between and in front of the sheds when it melts I was very glad that I noticed when the snow came down, and that I could do something about it promptly. If that had been allowed to sit overnight it would have frozen at the base, creating an ice damn that would have let a lake form anyway, since the water wouldn't be able to flow over it to drain down hill.

It is also good for making a sledding hill useable on the first real snow of the year. It was only about 15 to 20 cm of snow here, which isn't much, but it was fairly dense snow. I did the shoveling in six different sessions over the course of the day, which added up to more than three hours of exercise. Add to that today's yoga, morning situps, and testing my sledding hill (fun!), and I have managed more than 4 hours of exercise today. However, in between most shoveling sessions I was curled up with a book and something to eat, so am also closing in on four hours of staring at either the phone or the computer screen. such is life.

In other news I made a yummy spaghetti sauce tonight. This time it contained 1 package of ground moose meat (which I browned in lots of butter), one can of whole tomatoes, one box of crushed tomatoes, one jar of tomato paste, some frozen black currants, some dried nettles, a couple of handfuls of finely chopped walnuts, quite a few thin slices of cheese, plus spices: dried garlic, onion, coriander, nutmeg, basil, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, tarragon, oregano, pepper, beet powder, paprika, and "spice pepper". I plan to bake some of it into bread rolls tomorrow, and freeze the rest. I don't eat meat often (and never meat-industry products), so I shouldn't be eating lots of it at a time.

I always love snow, but when it comes at unexpected times, like this week, when the winter's accumulation had almost completely melted, it makes my smile even broader. Sure, it is really too warm for it, I had to break my winter boots back out because of the deep slush on the footpath, but the world really is prettier with the fresh white blanket instead of the brownish grass that hasn't yet seen enough sun to come back to life, the mud, the piles of gravel that are left from having been spread on the paths all winter...

It was raining when I woke up. Now, at 09:15, there are more white, fluffy "drops" falling than there are wet-rain drops. Somehow I doubt that anything will stick, but it *does* bring a smile to my face nonetheless!


Edit hours later: The local newspaper described today's snow fall as:

"An icy blast has brought snow to the centre of Hobart, with heavy falls in elevated suburbs and hail and sleet across much of the rest of the city and surrounds."

Today's snow made me smile, but that report made me laugh outright. You see, "heavy falls" caused accumulation of snow a few millimetres thick on the ground in my neighbourhood, which is one of the "elevated suburbs" they were speaking of. Somehow, after having grown up with real snow (read: it sticks on the ground for 4 to 6 months of the year) it is impossible to call the light, oh-so-cute, flurries we had today as "heavy falls". Indeed, I've seen it snow heavily enough here to accumulate a couple of inches thickness at this elevation, so even by Hobart standards this was only a dusting. Silly reporter!