Well, I guess I had that coming.

Shame on me for jumping the gun last week and started singing the praises of the spring-like weather.  That’ll teach me.  Call it karma, Murphy’s Law or just dumb luck, we got walloped with the biggest storm the Maritimes has seen in 10 years.

More of a hurricane disguised as a blizzard, I think.  A blizzicane.  Or snownado.

I thought it would be fun to document the day with a series of photos showing the progression of the storm.

After three sets of pics, I changed my mind and thought I’d leave it to your imagination.  There was no way I was going out in that mess unless I absolutely had to.   And I only had to twice: once to collect our airborne garbage bins (thought to be securely fastened to our front porch) and once to let Murdoch do his “business”.

Such a sad picture

It was after that trip that Murdoch said he wouldn’t go out there again unless he absolutely had to.  He didn’t.

“Outside? Nope, I can hold it.”

Kidding aside, it was pretty intense.  Par for the course for local islanders, I’m told.  But with a half-gutted, one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old house, we felt every wind gust.  And we didn’t get away unscathed.

We lost quite a lot of shingles on the north side.  The shingles were quite sparse on that slope to start, but now there are even less.  Oh well, it will make stripping them off in the spring much easier now that they’ve all been deposited in our yard.

Probably the highlight of the day was seeing our neighbor and his snow blower backing into our driveway.

God bless you, Orville.  I don’t think I’d have the strength to do the driveway today – after shovelling the snow out of our second floor.

Wait.  What?

Have to admit – I didn’t see this coming.

Yep.  With all the wall and ceiling finishes removed from the second floor – and with the 100 km/h wind and snow – and with more shingles blown off, well….

Come on – you got to laugh.  Or cry.  I laughed and thankfully, so did Vanessa.  After the storm, this was a cake-walk.  And with our neighbors help, we hardly had any snow to shovel anyhow.  It was a breeze (a gale-force breeze, mind you, but a breeze nonetheless).

But enough of that.  You’ve seen the footage, I’m sure, and we survived.  That’s the main thing, right?

As far as the house goes, until yesterday, our weather has been beautiful – sunny and clear – but really cold and windy, so needless to say, we didn’t do any of the demo I last spoke about: removal of the porch and rear addition.  They say the next couple of weeks will be milder, but wet.  Whatever the forecast holds, we’ll need to buckle down and get this done in anticipation of the foundation to start in May (or sooner, hopefully).

We haven’t been idle though.  We started a number of vegetable plants inside in preparation for the planting season.

Leeks, asparagus, peppers (sweet and hot), and some tomato seeds have been sown – and are starting to germinate.  We’ll move them to our grow-lights shortly and start the next round of plants after that.

For now, I’ll bite my tongue about spring.  We know it’s coming.  When it’s ready.