Old Man Winter Comes A Calling!!!

All week the TV weather forecasters had been promising a major snow storm for Wednesday evening through Thursday afternoon. Amount of predicted accumulation at first started at 2-4 inches, then increased to 3-6 inches, and last night on the 5:00 p.m. news it was 4-8 for the metro area of St. Louis. Snow started falling about 7:00 p.m. last night. Jeff left the house about 11:30 p.m. because for the last 3 snows he has been working with a grounds maintenance company that provides snow removal for a large group of business and industrial parks. He is on the hand shoveling crews that clears walkways. He got home about 4:00 pm. today. He had spent 15 hours shoveling snow. Much of the St. Louis area got 8-12 inches. We still had light snow falling until about noon today. We got 10 inches at our house in St. Peters. This is our third snow this winter. We got 3-4 inches Christmas Eve and 3.5 inches on Jan. 10. But this is a long way from the Blizzard of 1982 when we got 21 inches over two days at our house in Webster Groves, Mo (about 30 miles southeast of where we live now).
This is what it looked like when we opened the garage door this morning about 8:30 a.m.
A winter wonderland.
Jeff's car was just about covered up.
Pat got busy with the snow blower while I used the shovel .
I will give our St. Peters Public Works department high marks. When we first looked out this morning we could tell that the plows had been through the neighborhood at least once. Even though there might have been a couple of inches of snow on the street it was not ten inches. I know they have plow the main arteries first before they can get back into the neighborhoods. By 2:00 p.m. they had returned to plow our street pretty clean. I went out about 3:30 p.m. to pick up Jeff and the St. Peters main arteries were snow free. At least two lanes of the expressways were clean. As it snowed hard continuously (1-2 inches per hour at times) from 7:00 p.m. last night till mid morning it keep the snow removal crews busy with 12 hour shifts. They were working hard to get the streets clean to bare pavement since the temperature will drop down to 5 degrees tonight. Anything left on the the streets will become dangerous black ice during the night.

Whether it's rain, sleet, or snow the mail must go through. We usually get delivery about 1:00 p.m. I think ours got delivered today about 5:00 p.m. I saw our mail truck one street over from ours at 4:30 p.m. when I came back from picking up Jeff.
The Malibu lights are just sticking out of the snow.
Neighbor's outdoor play equipment.
Back of our house.
Picnic anyone!!
Neighbor's Weber Kettle BBQ grill.
The bird houses in our trees along the bank fence are topped with snow.
The bird feeder outside our breakfast room bay window was snow covered and empty. I filled it so the birds would have a place to feed since the rest of their world is snow covered.
The squirrels or birds have a nice dry place to feed in this feeder.
Pat saw a squirrel trying to get across a back yard and it was having a lot of trouble. The snow was too deep and light for it to walk and she said it was sort of hopping and rolling to move.