In the evening of Thursday, February 4, Marieke and I returned from an epic grocery shopping trip; we needed just about everything. Our normal parking spot was being taken up by one of Marty’s friends, the same one who a few weeks ago, bumped the car trying to get out of the driveway, whilst not paying attention to Marty’s directions. He was kind enough to move his truck before we unloaded too many more groceries. We told Marty that it was a good thing, too because we had to stock up ahead of the storm, which was, at that point, forecasting 5-8 inches. The snow was going to come over the course of the next day and should be pretty much over by midnight.
In the afternoon of Friday, February 5, Marieke said that the people she was in training with decided to end early because one of them heard the storm was now going to dump 9-12 inches of snow. This was somewhat hard to believe, since in storms past, the forecast was always off by at least 3 inches, usually on the short end at that.
By that evening, having decided to stay ahead of the snow and keep the sidewalk and steps periodically clear, we went outside to find Marty, his girlfriend Debbie and their dog, Carmen San Diego, already out, doing the same thing we were doing. I brought Oskar down and ran up and down the street with him as he tried not to let on that he was interested in playing with Carmen. The four of us concluded that we may just hit the 12 inch mark since there was already a substantial pile of snow on the cars and it was only 9pm.
We went to bed that night, expecting a heavier than normal, but not an outrageous amount of snow. Our plans for the next day were still on: Marieke had an afternoon hair appointment and then we were off to get Alyssa for a sleepover. While our plans may have to be pushed back to accommodate clearing the steps and brushing off the car, it wouldn’t amount to more than 15 minutes to a half hour delay.
On the morning of Saturday, February 8, I was startled awake at 7:30am, by three words that I heard coming from the television: ‘state of emergency’. The local channel 4 news had a ticker running along the bottom with ‘County commissioner declares state of emergency in Allegheny County’. Within about five minutes, ten other counties did the same. After another five minutes, the governor announced that the entire state was under emergency declaration. The reason for these successive declarations was linked to the 24 inches of snow that somehow fell to the ground. The official total as of 8:00am was 18-24 inches; some parts of the area had up to 28 inches.
All we could do was run from window to window shrieking in disbelief.
I really didn’t want to double the work of shoveling, so we decided to wait until the snow stopped before beginning the clean up process. Of course, we had to cancel our plans, much to the horror of Alyssa. She even tried to convince Carey that Bill could bring her here.
Mom had my gloves from last Friday when we had to retrieve her phone, so I needed them before I could start the process anyway.
Plans were drawn up to meet mom at Giant Eagle, or closer to her place, sometime after noon. She couldn’t wait to bring them, so had to stand on the sidewalk until I finished digging out the steps.
Digging those steps out and the sidewalk was nothing short of a feat. Perhaps not enough can be said for having done alot of ‘pre-shoveling’ the night before, even though it didn’t look like I shoveled at all.
I offered to help dig out the cross street neighbors after finishing our side of the street, since there was no sign of Marty at this point (he came out after I finished helping the ladies). They gladly accepted and we worked to keep most of the shoveled snow in the driveway and not around the car.
We did have some fun during the whole mess. ‘Fluffy’, the strange, white, long hair cat who makes his home on Montclair, made no effort to hide the fact that the street snow made for an excellent potty. I fell into a snow bank while trying to cross the street and Marieke took to throwing snowballs at me as I shoveled.
It’s kind of fun to be stranded in the snow and be snowed in, but literally hundreds of thousands of people are without power in the city and I can not fully express how grateful we are that we still have our lights on. Watching the nearly 12 hour local news coverage of the snow storm was interesting. Over the course of the day, the governor shut down all the interstates and the city learned that our mayor was out of town to celebrate his birthday. Of course, we have plenty of snacks for the Super Bowl between the Colts and Saints (Geaux Saints!!!) later.
I doubt Marieke will be going to work tomorrow.
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