Edit 7:30pm Wednesday – Finally got on to my own laptop to edit and upload the snow pics, have been glued to the work one for a large part of the day, got a lot done, I like snow days!!  These are from just before lunch when Andrew fired up the beastie, aka the snow blower, and I dug out his car on the driveway and the path to the front door:

Wind driven snow 6ft up a Spruce!

A little hard to see but a good 10″ at the top of the driveway and waist deep piled up snow from the snow blower behind.

The big beastie that helped with the grunt work, I love using the snow blower but today I shoveled a bit!  Andrew has also cleared out in to the road behind him so I hope to get to work in the morning.

The view from the inside with snow splattered windows from the high winds.

Edit 8am Wednesday:  WOW – I haven’t checked the radar yet to see what happened, but quite amazingly we dodged the bullet!!  It was as windy as hell during the night and woke us up a couple of times, and each time I thought “snow doesn’t make a noise when it hits the house”, but fell back to sleep.  We seem to have no more than a few inches of snow but it did turn to freezing rain for a while overnight, making conditions treacherous, that’s what I heard each time I woke up.  There’s hardly no-one on the road at all that I can see, the schools are shut, as is where I work, but I have my work laptop at home and will be working form home for a few hours.  It’s still very windy, and there’ll be a few more inches of snow today, maybe 1″ – 3″, but 18″ – 24″???  Not in this lifetime!  At least not here anyway.

Lol, I know it’s Wednesday and I’m supposed to show you my desk, but what’s going on outside right now is just so much more interesting than my desk, which has had very little use this past week!

Crafting has taken a back seat since last Wednesday, and I’m sorry I didn’t get round to many of you last week, just the folks that visited me.  I was super busy at work and coming home quite tired.  On the home front we’re finishing off the re-decorating of our bathroom by putting new lights up and bathroom accessories, at the same time as doing a little touch up in other parts of the house!  The family room has had some serious attention and painting and we took delivery of our first flat screen tv and some new pieces of furniture, just small pieces for dvd storage and a tv plinth and two bookcases, so the house is a bit upside down right now!

My car has been a bit sickly too!  Hesitating and missing quite badly, but very intermittently, to the point where I lost all acceleration at the end of last week and had to pull off the road!  Luckily it restarted and I got it to the dealer this morning.  Amazingly it turned out to be a badly fitted air filter that the previous owner had put on that was allowing cold, moist air into the engine and freaking out the engine sensors, you couldn’t believe the behavior of the car and all the dash warming lights it was throwing at me!  Even the dealer was surprised at the amount of trouble caused by a flimsy paper filter!  All fixed now though although my wallet is $121 lighter.

And then there’s this…. they’re calling it the Storm of 2011 and the Blizzard of the Century among other things!!  It sounds like typical American sensationalism reporting, but what’s quite staggering about it is it’s proving them all correct so far!!

That storm cell is 2,100 miles long and that’s just the part that’s dropping a foot or more of snow, South of the pink is severe ice storms and South of that are thunderstorms and possible tornados.  I’m writing this Tuesday night and will be scheduling the post for early Wednesday morning, when I hope to be able to update with real photos.  Currently we’re under a blizzard warning with 3″ of snow an hour and 40mph winds starting around midnight for about 6 hours, but continuing to snow most of Wednesday too.  We were looking at total accumulations of 10″ – 15″ but around 5pm Tuesday they upgraded us to 18″ – 24″.  It’s 10pm Tuesday night right now and I can hear the wind picking up, we’ve only had about 2″ of snow so far.  It’ll be interesting to see what is outside my windows Wednesday morning, is it all hype?  Or is it Armageddon??!!

Monday morning at a local grocery store when Andrew popped in at 9am, they already had five checkout’s open, the place was packed and he had to wait 20 minutes in line to pay for his items!  People are buying everything in sight like we’re going to be marooned for weeks!

But it is very serious, Oklahoma has already seen in excess of 20″of snow in parts and six feet high drifts, they’ve immobilized The National Guard, as have the State of Missouri were they also have 500 power company workers on standby and have called in another 800 from other states, as their main problem will be an inch of ice and freezing rain, so they will likely have severe power problems.  There have already been a number of fatal crashes from Minnesota to Ohio, and thousands of people are stranded at airports around the country.  This was Oklahoma earlier today, and this is what’s heading our way…

One wag posted a picture of Tulsa Airport on The Weather Channel, with the comment that the only thing arriving at the airport today was the snow!  But it’s the poor people in the NE States that I feel sorry for, they’ve been pummeled so far this winter and have already had two or three massive storms before this one reaches them.  One of the videos on The Weather Channel today was of an official from a little town in New Hampshire who said they just didn’t know where to put the snow anymore, they couldn’t clear it and pile it up because the existing piles were already as big as houses!  And he wasn’t joking either.

And in Poughkeepsie, Upstate New York even the Baptist Church was looking elsewhere for an answer…

So, after all this rambling about the weather, and we all know how us Brits love our weather, I hope we have more than the current 3″ of snow on the ground in the morning, otherwise I’ll have rather a lot of egg on my face AND I’ll have to go in to work too when I’m really looking forward to a Snow Day!!

And one final thing.  Last week on WOYWW, I said to Sue Allen in a comment on her blog that we’d got off really lightly this winter so far!  Obviously I really need to learn to keep my mouth shut!!

If you want to see the real crafting desks of the world, head on over to Julia’s pad, but if you’d like to have more reporting on the US weather, end of the world as we know it, then check back in again soon!

There’s a lot of folks on WOYWW from different parts of America now, so if this storm is affecting you, stay safe and warm and visit the folks in Australia and the Phillipines for a little sunshine!!