Snow Day!

bozz(82)

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If you live in the northern part of the US (or further south), you probably heard about the massive storm that just blew across the majority of the country. Take a look at @ericvancewalton's blog to see how he and his wife got out of Minnesota just in time.

It was about noon yesterday when I got a message from my dad about 45 minutes south west that the storm was starting to hit sooner than they had projected. School had already been called off, but I decided to drive in anyway because I had some servers I wanted to update and restart. What better time than when the buildings were practically empty.

As I said, it was about noon when he messaged me. A short time after that, @mrsbozz texted me to tell me that one of the major cities near us had declared a snow emergency and they were shutting down the city offices.

I had planned on staying until 2, but I decided around 12:45 I was going to call it a day and head home.

It's a half hour drive from my office to the front door of my house in good conditions. A lot of that drive is expressway, but I decided to avoid the expressway yesterday and take the back roads. The problem with the expressway when the roads are bad is people still try to go 75 MPH (or faster) even though they shouldn't be due to the conditions.

The backroads are a bit slower going and in worse condition, but you are usually taking that idiot driver factor out of the equation, which is a good thing.

It took me about 45 minutes to get home and this was before the storm really kicked into high gear. There were a lot of unknowns yesterday. The area of Michigan where I live was in a band that could have been either snow, sleet, or a combination of the two. Further south they were looking at a ton of freezing rain which in my opinion is almost worse than snow.

It was pretty nasty last night with the wind and snow coming down. If I had to guess, we probably got about 6 to 8 inches of snow by the time I woke up this morning. It's kind of hard to tell with how much the wind was blowing the snow around.

It's interesting how my views on snow days have changed in the past couple of years. I honestly attribute a lot of that to Covid.

In the school district where I work, I am considered an administrator. That means while all the other staff like teachers get snow days off, I still have to report.

Usually, I don't mind too much making the drive over to work even though the roads aren't the greatest. I can think of a couple of times I should have stayed home but I didn't, but those occasions are few.

This year though, I haven't felt the need or desire to go in when the roads are like this. I know @mrsbozz is happier about that, but like I said a lot of it goes back to Covid I think. Covid put us in the position where we pretty much proved that some of our job can be done effectively remotely.

Given that fact, I have felt a lot better about telling my superiors I am going to work remotely versus making the drive in. It's a really nice feeling.

It gives me the chance to enjoy mornings like this with Jovi and my wife. It took me a good half hour to 45 minutes to totally clear the deck. The snow was so deep that I could only push a small amount at once.

The way the wind was blowing from the West caused the snow to pile up against the stairs going down from our sliding door. I'm actually surprised that Jovi didn't get stuck trying to get down. She seemed a bit out of sorts when she first sunk down into the snow. She just turned around and looked at me like she was saying "help!".

It was a pretty beautiful sight to wake up to. If I had gone in at my regular time it would have been dark and I wouldn't have been able to truly enjoy this. You can get an idea of how much the snow piled up on the rail of the stairs there in the bottom of the image.

Just another view of the snow on the deck once I cleared a small path so I could start chipping away at the rest of the snow. As you can imagine it was quite an undertaking. I could have just left the snow, but I really don't like Jovi going to the bathroom on the deck. I'm not too worried about the weight because I saw how well the builder supported it when he built it several years ago.

After I cleared the deck I went out front and used the snow blower to clear out our driveway. That took me another half hour or so to get finished. By the time I was done I came in and @mrsbozz had made me the amazing breakfast you see above. It was so fantastic. She made the eggs perfectly, they were runny and delicious. A little bit of ketchup on the hash browns and I was in heaven!

There you go, this is basically just a photo dump from my snow day. This is the second snow day in the past two weeks that I have taken. It is crazy to me to think that businesses still require folks to come in to the office and work when it has been proven they can be just as productive at home.

It's really too bad that so many businesses are back tracking on that now that Covid appears to be behind us.

Thanks for stopping by!