if this isn't nice

The first few weeks of February were really freaking cold, with the daily highs hovering around the -20 degC mark and getting down below -30 at night. We mostly cocooned inside for weeks while listening to the ‘ole oil furnace kick on at least once an hour. At least it was mostly bright and sunny out! The bulk of our exercise consisted of clearing the driveway after the winds blew in the powder snow from the surrounding flatlands, which was almost a daily occurrence. The wild thing is the winds turned the snow into ‘snowcrete’, which required breaking up with a shovel prior to running over the chunks with Fernando, our trusty new snowblower. In hindsight we should have used the blocks to build an igloo… they were certainly large enough!