As, I may have mentioned once or twice (or a million times ), we've had quite a bit of snow. Many feet actually. It's piled high everywhere.
Well, today, the wind really started to blow - a north wind at a steady 35 mph with gusts up to 50 mph. So we now have drifts. Lots of drifts. Lots of really deep drifts.
I came home at lunch to take Clem for a walk during our little arctic ground blizzard. We actually had a great walk - it was pretty entertaining to watch Clem's fur blow straight out sideways - although I don't think she was amused.
Anyhoo, after the walk, Henry II and I headed back to work. We made it to end of the driveway where we instantly became profoundly and deeply stuck. I've lived in Alaska my whole life - I've never been as stuck as I was today - in our driveway for God's sake.
Turns out that the snow had drifted so deeply, yet so uniformly across the driveway that I had no idea that our normal plowed-looking driveway was actually covered with 8 inches of quicksand-to-concrete blown snow. To complicate matters, the giant 20 foot tall Mt. Castner snow berm that the city has created and left at the end of our driveway morphed from a smooth rock hard berm that Henry and I have been banking off a la a bobsled run, into an undetectible swamp of two foot drifts.
It's amazing how stuck one can become in a mere ten feet. Henry had snow packed in solid up to his undercarriage the entire length of the car. I couldn't even use a regular snow shovel to excavate him - the shovel blade wouldn't even begin to fit under the car. I had to use a clam shovel - which was pretty hilarious.
After a significant amount of shoveling (and no clams to show for all that work) and with some timely help from a burly neighbor, we managed to blast Henry II out of his predicament. And amazingly, although a little disheveled and wet, I managed to make it to my next meeting on time.
9:04:32 PM
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