A different season

Yes, this drain in front of the kids' house in Portland, Maine, looks a little different than it did when I showed it to you last summer. 

The Portland area had a huge week or so of snow just before I arrived (I don't know if it was from the same system that dumped so much on Garfield, Colorado, but the accumulations were similar!).

Now the weather has turned warm and a lot of the stuff is melting, but there's so much it will take more than a few days of spring-like temperatures to make a dent. I'll show you more scenes from around town later, but here's what the parking lot looked like outside a toy store we visited today:

I was at a toy store because, of course, the main attraction up here isn't the winter weather but the Exceptional Granddaughter. I've been having so much fun playing with her that I don't have too much time left over to blog, but I'll try to get some writing in next week.

Wordless Wednesday: haven't seen this in a while!

Ice diamonds

"Twinkle, twinkle...like a diamond off the roof."

When you have some warm days after a lot of snow—at least they're warm when you're in full sun, as is the whole back of our cabin (love that passive solar!)—you're going to have a lot of melting. Then, at night, and on the next cold day, that melted snow will re-freeze, as ice this time.

As I told you in my last post, the giant cluster of diamond/icicles you see above caused some concern. But, boy, was it beautiful! I just love icicles, especially when the sun hits them and makes them twinkle. Part of it is novelty, I'm sure, since they are phenomena we hardly ever see where I live. I like to think that even if I were a Colorado native I'd still get a kick out of them, however.

Here are a few other views of this monster icicle cluster, one looking back from the deck...

before The Shoveler got to work here

...and another from inside the living room...

...and yet another from the dining room window...and look at the size of that drift that links up with the icicles!

These, of course, were not the only crystals on display around the place. There were also lots of pretty singles...

Don't they look like solid ropes of diamond?! Another small delight (to go along with the hassles) of a Colorado winter.

Wordless Wednesday: everybody's favorite Latvian

The Shoveler

Yes, there was a LOT of snow that needed shoveling when we arrived at our cabin in Garfield, Colorado, a few weeks ago.

We couldn't even get in the front door! This is the scene that greeted us. Fortunately we hadn't dallied too long on the way and it wasn't dark yet; that would have complicated things...

The Shoveler contemplates his first challenge

Another lucky break was the snow shovel being accessible; if it had been inside the garage, we'd have had a lot of hand-shoveling to do!

Here's what the front porch looked like the next morning, showing our little canyon-like path that allowed the door to open:

I did help a little with the shovel-work, but it was 99.99% Henry's brawn that accomplished all this and the following excavations.

This is the view from the front door of the gigantic drift the next morning (I thought it was cool that this snap also captured a shovel in action!)...

In this picture, Henry was working on one of his priorities: to clear enough of the stairs to the cellar, where the furnace is located. We thought we might have to get in there to do some furnace work (more about this later). Plus by clearing this area somewhat, there was more space available for the piling of future snowfall by Tony, our wonderful plower.

Here's The Shoveler, in the midst of work on the cellar stairs...

...and here's the finished product...

Pretty good work for an old guy, eh?!

Now, about that furnace, which was actually a very serious problem. When entering the house (after 20 minutes or so of shoveling) we smelled what we thought at first was a dead animal—we've had experience with this smell before! 

But further investigation showed that it was a propane leak. Yikes! Henry discovered the location, in the garage, pretty easily with some soapy water and a paint brush, but how to repair it, when the tanks—and the shutoff valve—were under 4+ feet of snow...that was another issue!

The tanks for our place and the Schoolhouse are somewhere in that mass of white stuff between the two buildings. After considerable exploration, conferring with the propane delivery guys, and several hours of just plain manual labor, the valves were exposed.

Even if we hadn't had the leak, those tanks would still need to be cleared so that the propane guy could refill them at the end of the month. It's doubly—if not triply!—important. If the tanks run dry and the furnace shuts off, we could just pile on more blankets, but the pipes would freeze that is a major disaster!

There was so much snow on the deck we were even a little concerned about all that weight. So The Shoveler also spent a good deal of time sending scores (hundreds?) of shovel-fuls of snow down the hill over which our deck is cantilevered.

[Yes, it would be nice to have a snow blower, although it wouldn't have done much good at this point considering the depths we were confronted with!]

The photo at the top of the post shows what part of the deck looked like pre-shoveling. That railing is about 3' high for reference.

And, after a rudimentary path was available, I walked out and took this shot of a really formidable drift, looking back at the cabin:

Here's a shot of the Shoveler in action on the deck, almost down to bare wood:

You might have noticed a mother-of-all-icicle-clusters on the back wall in the photo above. I was really concerned about it falling and either breaking our patio door or at least gouging out a wall. So fortunately Henry had time before we left to do some serious shovel-and-pick work over there...

notice where he's standing in relation to the top of the railing!

And he got it down! Over the railing it went. But I snapped a picture first...

Now, at least until another cluster forms, that wall and doorway are safe.

Next up: I'll show you the beauty that those icicles offered us, in spite of their menace.

Who blew up the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man?

The ski area near our place in Colorado is known for good snow...but this was ridiculous! We're 3-4 miles down the road from Monarch Mountain, about 1000' down in elevation, and that little bit of difference means that in town we usually don't get the heaps of powder that they do.

But "usually" means that sometimes you do!

We were greeted by drifts so high when we arrived that we (mostly Henry) had to spend 20 minutes or so shoveling in order just to get into the front door. (Fortunately there was a shovel out on the porch and reachable! I will show before-and-after shots, plus action pix of Henry at work, next time).

Of course all this white stuff means good skiing (and I'll show some ski area scenes soon, too) and lots of fun for folks who don't have to drive in it. The renters in the Schoolhouse just before we arrived must have had fun digging the tunnel you see above from the parking area to their porch.

And some other residents of the area weren't stopped from nocturnal ramblings...on the left are some formidable tracks that led right up to the Schoolhouse back door!

While the back entrance to the Schoolhouse was almost clear and an animal shelter, from our second-floor window it looks almost completely buried!

Other pix to give you an idea of how much snow we were dealing with...

out storage shed and its new top hat; fortunately we didn't have to get into it

Henry providing scale for Schoolhouse parking area drifts

I took a walk down our very snowy main street when I was too pooped for two days of skiing in a row....here's the street, and our always-sketchy driveway...

We've never seen this street "canyonized" like this before! But street and drive were both navigable, and we were very glad to have an all-wheel drive rental vehicle (in spite of the extra expense, even Henry admitted it).

Anyway, walking was easier than driving, and at the end of the street I always love seeing our little creek. I've written about it before, and I'm glad I know where it is. Since it was almost completely hidden...

view from our deck

looking upstream from the bridge 

The lovely gurgling brook sound, which is always somewhat muffled in winter, was almost completely muted, too. But don't the puffy pillows of snow look pretty on the banks?

They looked pretty on our deck, too, although this much snow—which melts a bit in the sun, then freezes, over and over—is a matter for concern...

So Henry did have to do a lot shoveling, when he wasn't skiing. I'll celebrate his heroic work next time. A lot of it was done up on the rise from which I took this picture of our "compound." Somewhere underneath that blanket are our propane tanks!

Wordless Wednesday: winter light