Snow Place Like Home

From what I've heard, the main conversation starter in the UK is the weather.  If so, then Missourians are a perfect match.  We're similarly obsessed, and it's no wonder.  Don't like the weather?  Wait a bit.  It'll go from 40+ degrees and sunny to this --

 -- in very short time.  I'm very used to talking about the weather.  Especially having grown up on a farm!  Want to know about the likelihood of rain?  Ask a farmer, specifically one pondering whether to cut hay or leave it a few more days.  My dad has a near perfect formula.  In the drive from home to town, if there are three or more turtles crossing the road, it's very likely to rain in the next 24 hours.  Really, it's about 75% accurate.  The natural world knows.  Birds yesterday were going crazy.  They knew what was coming today!

I've had this weather doodad on my computer for a while now, set to London.  I've been rather jealous of them, they haven't had below-freezing temps except for one night last week!  By the time my trip rolls around, I'll have a pretty good idea of what weather to expect.

But before then, I get to deal with Super Snow 2011.  What an entrance, February!  My car is snug in my garage, the dogs and I have food aplenty, and (touch wood) no power outage yet.  Speaking of the food, yesterday I took out my nicely-thawed tidy little package labeled "Sirloin Steak", and figured I'd have a nice meal out of it.  Heated up my pan, unwrapped the steak... and unfolded it.  And kept unfolding.  This was a steak the size of my head!  That package must have had Time Lord technology or something.  So I now have enough steak made up for about four meals.  Thank goodness I've got a good supply of steak sauce.

Remember my rose bush from the ice pictures?  There it is!  Down there at the end of the snowdrift!

My sidewalk is somewhere under that.  It makes a turn at the pot with the mum, but you'll have to take my word for that, I guess.  And the stuff is still coming down.

It's kind of hard to see, but there's a hole in the pole, a few inches above the snow.  What is impossible to see, there's another hole, several inches below that one, which was further above the snow as of this morning!  What a nice measuring tool!  What a massively huge amount of snow, yikes.

I'll see you at knitting Happy Hour, someday, assuming the St Bernards can find all of us, right?