TheCalabrias.com

March, 01 2009 Snow

We haven’t had any “real snow” here in Athens for 4 years now.  But, this past Sunday (03/01), we got a little taste of winter, and at least 8-10 inches  of beautiful, fluffy snow.  The conditions were just warm enough and humid enough to make the snow flakes to bind into HUGE clumps; and just cold enough to make it stick.  In fact, you could see cable lines, which are only about 1/4 inch in diameter, with 3 inches of snow miraculously piled on it.  Amazing!

Needless to say, with so much snow the kids were ecstatic! They would go outside and play  until their lips would turn blue, then come back in to warm up just enough to hurry back outside.  They had a blast! We had a blast!

But I must say it was also a little scary.  By late afternoon, everything had a nice think layer of snow, and we started hearing quite a bit of tree limbs cracking, and even a few trees falling…  A couple of  years back, we had a very large Pine tree just miss our neighbors house during a wind storm.  That same week we hired a logger to cut all the big trees from around the perimeter of our house (and the neighbors). The loggers were extremely precise on dropping the trees, but extremely clumsy getting them out. Thus, until this past weekend, I had always felt a bit of guilty for cutting them.  Not anymore. Several of the neighbors now wish they had.

Next morning Lorenzo and I surveyed the neighborhood, and we found quite a mess.  I guess after over two years of drought, the trees were not ready to bear all the extra snow/ice weight, and they simply snapped.  Luckily no one got hurt, and a lot of the threes did fall towards the street…which explained why we were out of power for 24 hrs.

As a bonus the Unversity was close the next day, the kids’ school for two days.  More snow ball fights!!

(Link to Flickr photos)