The Kelsey's

After a lovely Sunday where the temperatures made it up to 79 degrees, here we are on Tuesday facing snow all day. During class in the afternoon, Joshua went out and measured the accumulation. We had 11 inches in our front yard. The snow was even too high on our street to even get out and drive to some place to go inner tubbing. Just before dinner time I headed out to shovel the driveway. Joshua took that opportunity to take some pictures and video. And now we have it available to share with you.

Here we are as we get started with the shoveling. Mom and Nathan watched from the garage as I got to work. The snow came down so fast and abundantly that there was no ice sheet underneath. This made the shoveling surprisingly easy to do. The snow made for a mixed up day at work as well. I went ahead and decided to brave it across the river (my new contract has me working in Edwardsville). A few flakes started to fall as I left the driveway and by the time I was to the Mississippi, I could barely see the semi in front of me. I made it just fine, but after seeing it start to pile up, I decided to work from home in the afternoon. With minor technical glitches, the afternoon went by and around 5:30 I was thinking about taking the kids tubing. But Hannah didn’t have boots and Laura was afraid that we wouldn’t make it down the driveway, let alone the street. So I figured if we were going to get any groceries – as tomorrow is grocery day. I better at least clear a path down the driveway.

This is the fire hydrant right across the street – this is how high the snow got. That’s before the street was plowed, so none of that is a result of being piled up. That’s just how high the snow came.

Here is Nathan and mommy watching the driveway being cleared. Nathan was fascinated with the “no.” But he didn’t want to get down in it. Just a little technical note, in case you didn’t notice. I airbrushed our license plates so that we aren’t advertising our registration all over the Internet. I think it came off pretty good if I do say so myself. I getting the hang of all this web stuff little by little.

All done! Yeah, compared to Laura and Nathan, I’m a little bundled up. I didn’t know how long I was going to be out there. It went so quick, I might even consider saying it was fun. Naw…

Here is our video of this happening. Don’t be alarmed if it looks blurry to you, it starts out that way and the focus gets better as we go along. Also, this is filmed by Joshua, so take your Dramamine! It’s not too bad. Also, Nathan does NOT have a soul patch under is bottom lip. He had finished experiencing a pre-dinner brownie just before coming outside. Joshua thought there was 7 minutes of footage. It was a good guess, it came out to about 5.5 minutes. I am learning how to edit video, so I brought it down to 4 minutes. Most of that was spent with Joshua whipping around shooting at the tree tops trying to get a shot of the birds that were chirping away. They probably thought spring was coming soon after last weekend – frankly, so did we.

Just a quick technical note to self.  This video is embedded as Quicktime with Javascript.  There are four choices and I wasn’t sure which would be best.  Quicktime beats Flash for picture sharpness, and the Javascript makes it so you aren’t forced to load the video until you click on it. That’s nice for people who are running short on bandwidth.

This whole driveway ordeal took all of 15 minutes. But, as the threat of global warming causes us all to wear extra sunblock each time we bathe, and forces us to hold in our breath so as not to exhale as much poisonous Carbon Dioxide, it’s good to have these memories of a good hard snow – it’ll probably never happen again.