Teleidoscope

Mon, Jan 08, 2007

Wind

Posted at 7:57 pm MST to Miscellaneous

It's just as well that I didn't try to shovel out yesterday. Last night the winds were strong enough to shake the house and blow gravel off the flat part of the roof. I need one of those joke windspeed guages that are made from a piece of heavy scrap metal on a chain. BUt I'd need to hang it somewhere well away from the house so the weight doesn't go though a window when the chain breaks, which means serious post-hole digging to put up a support for it.

The first year after I bought this place I bought a wonderful windchime made of tuned metal pipes at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. On "moderately" windy days it used to spin like a helicopter blade, and I was worried about getting a pipe through the kitchen window if the metal sawed through the fishing line that held the pieces together in a high wind. So I eventually took it down, even though the sound was beautiful.

The shallow drifts are even deeper than yesterday: plants that were sticking up are now completely buried. And the deep drifts moved a couple of feet closer to the house. I can be sure of that because I left my snow shovel sticking up from the pile of snow where I tried shoveling, and this morning I had use a garden spade to dig through two horizontal feet of the drift to rescue the snow shovel. The snow was still very hard this morning: the shovel rescue took half an hour.

Today was sunny and about 20 degrees warmer than yesterday, so the moderate winds started eating away at the sides of the drifts and the top of the snow softened a bit. After lunch the wind died down or a while, so I was able to shovel from the house nearly to where the driveway would be if it weren't buried in about an hour. Then the wind picked up and started making things difficult. The deepest drift right near the house was about 4 feet deep and the shallowest snow I dug through was about 2 feet.

After resting and waiting for the wind to slack off again, I shoveled for another hour -- until the wind turned really nasty. I reached the driveway and part way down it.

I think I've reached a point about a third of the way from my front door to my truck at the end of my driveway, but that's kind of moot, because the road beyond the driveway has not yet been plowed. My neighbor has a three-rail fence along the road, and the drifts across the road are up to the middle rail.

I hope that tomorrow I will be able to get to the truck and get the truck to the main road. I need to get some stuff from the office so I can start work on my next consulting gig. Weather.com is predicting 42 degree highs and less wind (10 to 20 mph instead of 25 to 35 for down in Boulder, probably a bit higher here on the ridge) so the snow should be shovelable, but heavy.

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