Seriously hard impromptu workout

When I left for work yesterday morning, we had nearly a foot of snow. While I was working, nearly that much more snow fell. I asked my son, who had the day off from school, to run the snow blower up and down the driveway. He insisted it wouldn't run properly, so he couldn't do it. However, he found time to use the wet, heavy snow to construct a large throne for himself in the yard. Apparently, he was the king of all he could survey, with the exception of the snow blower.

When my wife and I got home, we barely got the car into the driveway. We immediately changed into appropriate clothes for clearing the snow and got to work. My planned running workout just wasn't going to happen; I couldn't leave all of that work to my wife and son.

So, my wife started using the snow blower to clear out the driveway. I used the snow shovel to work on clearing the porch and deck. My son used a garden rake to help push snow around. After the deck was clear, I got out my roof rake. The roof rake is ridiculously hard to use. Imagine a 30 foot long handle with a blade on the end. You push it as high as you can on the roof and then pull snow off the roof. As soon as I'd cleared as much snow as possible from the roof, we had to re-shovel the deck. The snow that had fallen from the roof was compacted and really not fun at all to shovel. The snow was perfect for making a snowman (or a throne), but not fun to move around.

Eventually, I took control of the snow blower to give my wife a break. She then spent some time trying to dig out the cars, while I cleared a parking area for the cars. Her car was easy; we'd driven it home only 90 minutes earlier. My car was completely buried and it took a lot of work to get it out of its spot. But, about two hours after we'd gotten home, the driveway was mostly clear, the cars were free, the deck was mostly clean, and the roof was raked.

And then, the town plow truck came through, plowing shut the entrance to our driveway. I muttered a few words under my breath and went back to work with the snow blower.

At this point in time, I noticed that a fair amount of snow had fallen while we were working. Some quick measurements showed that we had 24" of new snow at this point in time. In the 11 years we've lived in our house, this is the largest 24 hour snowfall that we've seen.

Sugarbush reported 32"-46" of new snow this morning. We are getting more snow right now, and they'll probably end up with over 5 feet of snow by Saturday morning. We are going to get blasted with wind later as well, so the frequent power outages we've been seeing may become more frequent or more prolonged. The coffee shop where I'm working right now is packed with people who have no power at home.

It's really late, but winter has finally arrived. And, I'm really sore because of it. My 2+ hour workout of clearing snow last night left me feeling pretty beat up. I was soaked from sweat by the time we were done. My wife was also very sore this morning. It was quite a workout and we get to repeat it tonight or tomorrow morning.