When does 1 inch = 1 foot?

When it's the weather forecast.

Or it sure seems like it whenever I look at the forecast. It keeps saying there will be 1 inch accumulation, but then when the storm hits, it ends up being closer to a foot (or more). Only when we are well within the storm does the forecast change to something along the lines of 6 inches of accumulation...

Last night when I went to bed, there was no snow and the winds were calm. around 1:30 a.m., the power went out and the battery backup units in our house started beeping. One of them automatically shuts down the computer connected to it, but the other one I didn't get to in time so it just blinked off before I could get it into hibernation. The power came back about 1-1/2 hours later.

That should have clued me in to how much snow and wind we were getting. I got up this morning and saw that it was snowing and what was on the ground looked fairly deep. Little did I realize how deep. I didn't have long to find out because when Elise came driving back from work, the pickup did not make it all the way into the driveway. After some effort, spinning wheels, going back and forth, she managed to get it all the way out of the road.

I went out there to push away the snow. Elise took the smaller shovel to dig out under the pickup. The center of the driveway had perhaps 8 inches and the sides where the snow drifted into had 1 to 1-1/2 feet of fine, light powder. (Though it doesn't feel very light after shoveling it around for a while.) After some considerable effort the snow was cleared sufficiently for the pickup to make it into the garage. The neighbor boy from across the street was plowing his driveway and he came over to help push away the berm that the city plow left behind at the entrance to our driveway.

I was covered head to toe in snow. Because there is just so much piled-up snow all around, I ended up having to lift the huge snow scoop up onto the existing piles, or leaning into the slope to push the full scoop up and over the top of the piles in order to dump the snow. Which meant that I ended up with my whole body in the snow much of the time.

With all this fresh snow, if the weather clears up tomorrow like it is forecast to do, I just might go out snowshoeing again.