Blizzard of 2011

Since I live in Chicago, I thought it appropriate to write a quick journal entry of the third largest blizzard in our City's history. I am old enough to remember the blizzard of '79 and this beat it! I'm sure most of the nation heard about this storm on the news and they really hyped it up, for good reason; it was bad. We got a total of 20.2 inches! They knew it was coming for days and they predicted to the hour when it was going to start. So on Tuesday, the snow started about 2:30 pm. My office which is downtown Chicago in the Loop, NEVER closes, but did close early at 3:00 and also closed yesterday. Tuesday night about 9:30 pm, we were happily sitting on our couch, in front of the fireplace, watching the storm out our back sliding door windows and the coolest thing was that there was thunder and lightening, in the middle of a blizzard! It was the weirdest and coolest thing I have ever seen! Unfortunately, I found out later that a friend of mine was stuck, along with hundreds of other drivers, on Lake Shore Drive, the main outter driver around the City, from 5 pm until almost 3:30 am!!! Can you imagine? I felt so sorry for those people. Apparently, the Drive was closed due to several exits closed because of accidents. I guess people in their cars were told to only leave their car running 10 minutes and off for 50 minutes so they wouldn't run out of gas. Wow what a bad night for those people!

The next morning was like waking up to a winter wonderland! The blizzard continued until about noon but after that, the sun came out and it was beautiful! Our cable was in and out but watching the news was crazy too because most of the news trucks could not make it anywhere so the news channels were asking people to email their pics into the station. So that's what they were showing, everyone else's pics of their winter wonderland. Uh I guess you'd have to be there to really understand what 20 inches of snow looks like but it's just amazing that Mother Nature could actually produce this kind of snow in less than 24 hours! The clean up for tremendous! We're one of the only ones with a snow blower on our street and so Ian was out helping all our neighbors. ALL our neighbors were out with shovels everywhere. In the front and in the alley. Uh our alley was crazy! Snow was almost as high as our garage with the wind drifts. Needless to say, Ian was out there for 4 hours snow blowing. I was out there for about 2 hours while Ava napped. Last night, Ian couldn't move he was so sore lol:) Great workout!

So here we are today, Thursday morning. A little more than half the City is functioning. Chicago Public Schools are closed again. Our courthouse is closed, but our office is open unfortanely. Only about half our staff is here. I believe it because the side roads are still undriveable. If anyone had a car parked on a side road that needs it for work, forget it. Luckily we have a Suburban with 4-wheel drive and Ian drove me to the train which was very behind schedule as well. We had a very hard time driving through the side roads. A normal car would never make it. But I made it! And Ava made it to daycare where about only half the kids showed up today. I can't even imagine the mess when all this starts melting! Now they are expecting COLD freezing temperatures for this week.

I know I will be telling Ava the story of this blizzard since it made history. I can tell her she was asleep in her crib probably dreaming of angels while the storm passed through. When I was nursing her to sleep in her room that night, I thought at one time the windows were going to blow in the wind was so strong! She never batted an eye.

I can honestly say, I am officially tired of winter! Bring on Spring!