GABRI DESIGNS: Historic blizzard

I guess you heard of the historic storm hitting the Midwest, all the way from New Mexico to Maine with historic 20" snowfall in 24 hours in Oklahoma and Chicago. Jeroen left for work Tuesday morning early.

The roads were still reasonably clean, but the forecast was pretty horrific. A couple of inches of snow on Monday night, so Johnny needed little cleaning.

Because of all blizzard and flood warnings along the lakefront that were in effect starting Tuesday 2pm, coming home from work around noon seemed the smartest thing to do. However, there is a snow ordinance/no parking in effect out in front of our house each Tuesday from 10am-2pm (so crews can clean the streets), so Johnny had to be parked further down the street. The blizzard lived up to the forecast - winds started picking up on Tuesday afternoon, creating another winter wonderland out there.

So better get Johnny, now we still can.

The strong northeastern winds blow straight from Lake Michigan over the fort's parade ground, making the snow go horizontally. Not sure if this is new snow falling, or snow being blown up from the ground. Probably both.

Some dogs are loving this weather, but the owners not so much. Ruba not so much either, so we are trying an indoor "potty-patch". So far without success, because of 13 years of conditioning and training to go and do her thing outside.

Tuesday evening is nice cocooning with the blizzard howling at 50-60 miles per hour outside, the century old roof cracking, and the Weather Channel reporting about power outages, ice rain in Indiana and motorists stuck on Chicago's Lakeshore Drive. We are learning new weather phenomena here, and today's term was "thunder snow". The thunder combined with the snow creates a catalyst, so around 9pm it was coming down at 2-3 inches per hour and blowing in all directions. Waking up on Wednesday morning it was still snowing, and we had about 2 feet on the ground. So much that they had stopped plowing.