When Peter and I lived in DC, we had no idea what we were doing when it came to freezing weather and snow. Having both grown up in AZ, we had never cleaned gutters (our desert homes didn’t even have gutters), removed hoses from the bibs before a freeze and we had no idea when you were supposed to put out salt (we actually thought you just threw it on top of the snow. That is not the case). Thankfully our landlords caught on and would let us know what to do. We also had a very nice neighbor that actually cleaned our gutters for us one fall. There was a language barrier so when we pantomimed asking to borrow his ladder, he just brought it over and got to work. We were never sure if he was being nice or if he thought we were too stupid to do the job ourselves. Our money was on the latter.

The last winter we were there, a HUGE storm was predicted – not unlike the one that is supposed to hit the Northeast today. We went to Target to stock up on supplies: salt, shovels, etc. except our cart also contained a lot of wine and a new sled. The storm hit over night and we woke up to a foot of snow. It was beautiful! We made coffee and snuggled back into bed to watch the news…only to have the power go out exactly 1 minute later. After waiting for a bit, we decided to go sledding. When we returned, still no power. We made breakfast on the grill off the deck and threw a bottle of champagne into the snow (see? our supplies were super important). We then bundled up, grabbed a dog to warm us up and read books. By 6pm there was still no power. And no heat. And no fireplace. We were woken up at 5am the next day to everything in our house coming back to life when the power came back on – we were bundled up like homeless people with both dogs under the covers.

So let this be a lesson to all you east coasters getting ready for the blizzard. Salt is all well and good, but make sure your sleds and wine supplies are stock piled too.

5pm Saturday

 

8am Sunday

There were steps under there somewhere

We were told icicles were bad news…I enjoyed every drop of them!

Abominable snow Travis!

We learned the hard way that the SUV should be the last one in. Trying to get the Audi over the ice berm created by the snow plow was challenging.

We couldn’t figure out where all the kids were…turns out they were waiting for the big dummies to shelp up and down the hill a few times and tamp down the snow.