Going...going...gone

As I mentioned last time, Portland, ME, had a huge snow dump just before my arrival. But the weather since I've been here has been unseasonably warm. Which results in swiftly melting piles of snow.

As a case study, below are photos from my luxurious guest suite window, looking down on the kids' deck. (I apologize for the strobing effect; most of these were taken through a screen.)

First up, a deck-level view, taken my first day here:

Reports had the tile-topped table covered with piles similar to those we saw in Colorado a few days before my arrival.

aerial view on day 1

2 days later (I missed one day when there was still a little snow on the chairs

next day....melting fast!
(the one day I was smart enough to shoot through the window, not the screen!)

next day; notice also the increasingly visible ground

I skipped a few more interim steps here, but this is from day 8...all gone!

I will have several more posts showing various interim stages of snow cover in the days (and probably weeks) to come.

As for now, the mild weather has flown and my last few days in Maine will be expressions of the New England winter that I said I wanted to experience. I'll try to stay warm!

Wordless Wednesday: a dream of spring

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.