It's really really really coming down hard now, and the county sheriff is advising people to STAY OFF THE ROADS. So the library is now officially closed all day. I get a Snow Day, yay!

Here is the view out my window right now. In fact, as I look now, there seem to be even MORE flakes and they're coming down even faster and thicker! Amazing! You people in Texas don't know what you're missing, it's gorgeous. :-D

I've been literally "under the weather" for a few days now, buried under a blizzard of 18 inches of snow AND suffering from bronchitis. It's been a crappy few days. I blame the illness on Hillary--all that walking door to door in cold wet weather to stump for her certainly didn't do me any good, other than mentally. But Ol' Man Winter is to blame for our lovely blizzard on Friday and Saturday--it was incredible! Snow fell fast and furious all day long, both days; we got 8 inches the first day and another 10 the next! Thankfully I didn't have to go anywhere except out to the barns, and Sandy helped me with those chores, she did all the shovelling and heavy stuff. I wouldn't have been able to go to work on Saturday even if the library had been open, which it wasn't--pretty much our whole state shut down for a day. They're saying now that we've gotten the highest snowfalls in our area in decades. This photo I took from the comfort of my living room, where I pretty much lived for five days, shows the snow drifted on top of my car. It was fascinating to see how the winds tossed it around so that the entire driver's side of my car stayed free of snow, while the other sides got the brunt.

This is a closeup of the snow that stuck to the overhang on the barn roof--I love how it got sculpted by the wind. I took this in the evening as the light was almost all gone, so it didn't turn out quite the way I wanted it to, but you get the idea. If I'd been feeling 100% I would have loved to go out hiking in all of that snow and take some really great snow pictures, but I had to settle for what I could see within my limited boundaries. I tell ya, I hate being sick in any event, but especially when there is over a foot of beautiful snow lying there for me to play with! Ugh. And I've never had bronchitis before, I must be getting old; it was really scary. (Don't worry, I've been taking antibiotics and tons of meds and I'm well on my way back to good health now, whew.) I read some, and watched a little tv, but probably more listened to than saw, since I kept nodding off at all hours, then waking up every couple of hours too. Very annoying. My parents even came over to bring me, you guessed it, homemade soup! (Plus other food and a humidifier and more meds, bless them) I couldn't even thank them properly because I haven't had a voice for three days! I really hated to miss working on Saturday, odd as that sounds, because it was going to be a busy day for me--in addition to Anime Club, which I love (I have a great group of teens who come faithfully every month and are a lot of fun), I was scheduled to give a talk and a library tour to a library science class from Kent State. I do this same presentation every semester, and it's always so rewarding. They're all enthusiastic future children's and teen librarians, they're excited about what they want to do, and I get to gush about my job and my library to them. We usually get a few new library card registrations out of it, I often get a new practicum student interested as a result, and it's just a really satisfying thing to do. Hard to explain, but I love my library and I love being able to show it off. But university classes were cancelled as well as the library and everyone else shutting down. And of course, had I gone in I was going to have to pantomime or use American Sign Language anyway, so that wouldn't have worked... :-) We'll reschedule it for as soon as possible.


Interesting how the light was tinted blue during this time of day. This shot is of the storm raging around us. Again, shot through the window of course, I am not that big of an idiot. :-) Okay, I guess that's all I have to say about snow and being sick. Enough on those two topics. I have one more entry to make before heading in to work a short shift this evening, now that I'm recovered. Goldie will be glad to have me out of the house, she's been wondering why the heck I haven't left her side in so long! Totally not like me!

Well, not so cold today, but this weekend was a real humdinger here. It was 6 degrees fahrenheit at 5am when I woke up to feed the horses, and let me tell you that is no picnic to push a wheelbarrow in... It was the first time this winter I've had frozen waterbuckets to deal with in the back barn (see this entry: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-18meP.gyfKNcbpuh1O.aQQ--?cq=1&bid=200&yy=2007&mm=2 from February 2007 for a particularly rough wintry day in the barn. There are two entries that day, see the second one) Thankfully it's warmed up to about freezing temps now, and other than a brief blizzard this morning, we have hardly any snow. The blizzard really was a pain; it hit just as I was preparing to drive 2 hours to a library meeting 150 miles away. Ack! I ended up arriving late, but only 10 minutes late, which was amazing considering we were crawling along at 10 mph for several miles. We got an inch of wet sloppy snow in an hour, it was really incredible. Welcome to real winter, as opposed to the 60 degree temps we had a mere couple of weeks ago!