Snow, snow and more snow.

Katherine and I noticing a tendency whenever we move to a new place for the weather to swing pretty extreme for whatever season it is. When we arrived in San Diego in January of 2005 it was cold (like 40 degrees) and rained for five days straight. Now we're in Michigan and this is one of the worst winters in history (I don't really have any qualifiers for that hyperbole).

The funny thing about it is that every time, the locals apologize profusely to us for the weather (like they have anything to do with it.) When we were in San Diego, we had just come from New York and DC, so 40 degrees and rainy was nice. This time (having come from San Diego), minus 9 degrees that feels like minus 23 degrees is the nuts. Katherine looked at the 10 day forecast and starting Friday, it's supposed to snow everyday through the next weekend. Tomorrow's supposed to be a sunny 32 degrees out.

Since some of our readership is not from the northern climate (and there are those among you who have never seen snow), I thought I'd put up some more pictures of the snow. The picture above is an icicle that I broke off of the railing that is outside our backdoor. As you can see from the picture, it is almost as long as Lyla is (two feet!!!).

To the left is a picture of our rental taken from the driveway a couple nights ago. It's not too telling until you look at the picture of the pathway that leads from the front door down to the driveway. That's a single shovel-width path through snow that's about 10 inches deep. Since that picture was taken, about 6 more inches of snow has fallen.

And finally, this is a video I took by placing the camera on the dashboard as I drove back from the D&W (grocery store that's about three blocks from our house). Be sure to take a look at the snow piles at the end of our driveway that you can see 9 seconds. Those are the build up of months and months of snow plows cleaning up the streets of East Grand Rapids. The video gets boring after about 1 minute in because it's basically me backing into our parking space and bringing the groceries into the house. Watch at your own risk.