Reality Came on Sunday!

Well, we had a great snow day on Saturday! I loved everything about it--The food, playing with the dogs, and just hanging out! It could not have been a nicer day at home!

Living in the country has really been a learning experience. I've learned that we need to be self sufficient, because we have no neighbors, and it's "just us." We found this out our first summer here in the country when the lights went out. We had no water, no candles, and no batteries or flashlights, and dead cell phones. That only happened once. The next time the lights went out (and they did!) we had everything and more and it went smoothly.

We've had the same sort of thing happen with the snow...On Sunday, we had a big reality check!! This is a picture of the top of our driveway, and our reality was, that we needed to dig ourselves out from under the nearly 2 feet of snow so that we could go to work on Monday. Thinking it wasn't a "big deal" we had a plan that at the time, didn't seem like it would be too hard to pull off. The plan was for Carl to shovel out the main part of our drive-way by the garage. We figured we would only need enough space for me to back my van out of the garage, drive over to the top of the driveway and then I'd make my run down to the end, and as simple as that, we'd be out! I wish it had been that easy...I quickly got stuck. Not being deterred by this set back, we dug my van out, and tried it again, and again, and again...At four o'clock in the afternoon we were still trying to shovel our way down to the end of the driveway, and my van continued to get stuck. We had made progress and were about 3/4 of the way down the driveway, but it was getting dark and we had to give up and we came back inside, defeated. I will say that the dogs were a great comfort in my discouragement over not being able to dig ourselves out. A couple of them came to me and quietly wagged their tales and put their head on my leg and just looked at me with their soulful eyes...It was much needed and appreciated.

In deciding what our next step would be, it was a big help that the Federal Government was closed today (Monday), and we didn't need to worry about Carl getting to work. However, I needed to be at my office to cover for our office manager who was going to be out. Fortunately, the "new girl" in our office (you remember, the one who drives me crazy & talks too much) only lives about 10 minutes from me, and I called and got a ride from her--Funny how her high energy and endless chattering about everything didn't bother me on the ride to work and home this evening...

Carl finished the job of shoveling the driveway this morning, and we have learned our lesson, the hard way...We will either be purchasing a snow-blower, or hiring someone to plow our driveway in the big snowfalls. My love of and hope for snow-days isn't going to change--I'm already looking forward to the next one, but I'll also be looking forward to not having a morning-after reality check!