For the love of Pete!

It’s almost April and today was a snow day!!  The boys are home from school, cussin’ and discussin’ so I sent them outside.  I tried to convince them to go out by telling them that it might be the last big snow of the season and they should enjoy it.  Cayden just rolled his eyes at me and said “sure it will” (dripping in sarcasm of course).

The funny thing is that Fargo has been making sandbags for weeks in flood preparation and was all set to start delivering them to the neighborhoods but that is all on hold thanks to this latest storm.

In the past 24 hours we have had rain, sleet, snow, ice, thunder sleet and graupel.  I will give a prize (ok, an imaginary pat on the back) to anyone who knows what that is.  I never knew the name for the type of precipitation until today.  According to Wikipedia:

 Graupel (also called soft hail or snow pellets; refers to precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water condense on a snowflake, forming a 2–5 mm ball of rime; the snowflake acts as a nucleus of condensation in this process. The term graupel is the German word for this meteorological phenomenon.

                       

 

They said we got about 8 new inches of snow (although that doesn’t count the other forms of precipitation).  We were lucky, several towns nearby got 12-18 inches.  In the end, though, it only matters how much moisture was present since it all eventually ends up in the Red River. You can kind of judge how much snow we got based on Cayden’s height in this picture.  I think we got more than 8 inches.

you can see how thrilled he is to be outside :)

 

Now the drift between the houses is halfway to the roof and the mailboxes are nearly buried again.

 

Thankfully in North Dakota the snow plows come fairly quickly.

 

Max hates the snow.  He tries to find any way, an excuse to not go outside to go potty.  I think that a lot of times he would rather go on the floor and take the punishment he knows will come.  For some inexplicable reason today, Max loved the snow.  He ran all around the yard with snow up to his armpits and then proceeded to roll all around in the snow, caking his entire coat with snow and ice.

 

Cayden even put a new twist on one of Max’s favorite games—snow ball catch and fetch.  If you look closely you can see the snow ball in the middle of the picture.  There was so much moisture in the snow that the balls stayed intact and Max was able to bring them back to Cayden.

 

The Weather Channel is running a contest called America's Toughest Weather City Tournament.  You vote online on their website.  You can use this link      http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/americas-toughest-weather-city-tournament_2011-03-12.  Please vote for Fargo.  I don’t think we actually win anything other than recognition and sympathy but I figure if we have to live in these conditions, we deserve to win.  We are down to the final 8 cities and recently beat out International Falls, MN.  They take our flooding into account and certainly days like yesterday and today factor in.  So, as a favor to me, please vote.

 

As you can see, the sun is out today, the snow has stopped, the snow plow has come.  For the love of Pete, I sure hope school is back in session tomorrow!

Who is this Pete character?  I’ve got a few things to say to him :)

 

Laura