April Snowstorms Bring May Flowers?

Though the calendar says April, Old Man Winter wasn't quite done with us yet.

On Tuesday night, the meterologists were predicting up to ten inches of snow and though I didn't get my ruler out on Wednesday morning, I would say they were pretty close.

When I woke up, I looked out the window at the driveway and debated; do I want to put the snowblower back on the tractor? 

But wait, back up the truck here; why did we take the snowblower off the tractor before June in Wisconsin?  What was I thinking?

Well, it all started off fairly innocently.....we'd had a very dry fall and winter and near the end of March we got the urge to get at some garden remodeling.   

For some time now, Thing Two has been bugging me.  Thing Two was a repository for a bunch of spare limestone boulders we had leftover from the Pachyberm and it had been my bright idea way back in 2010 to make a small garden feature out of them instead of leaving them in a pile out in the Eight.  Thing One (on the right side in the photo below) is actually bigger than Thing Two (on the left) but for now, I'm thinking I'll keep Thing One. 

The Things

While the ground was still fairly frozen, off went the snowblower, on went the forklift teeth and we started hauling the rocks back out to the Eight for storage.

 (Just think, some husbands complain when their wives want to move the living room furniture around, 'On second thought, honey, I think the couch would look better on the other wall; oh, no, I guess I liked it better where it was'....well, around here, Carl has to put up with, 'I think we'll take those rocks out and do something else with them.'   Just for the record (and marital harmony) let me reiterate, Carl was the one who wanted to leave them on a pile in the first place, but he humored me.)  

We worked on dismantling poor Thing One on March 25th when there was no snow left on the ground.

Audrey and Daddy on Easter

Even our little Audrey, now almost two years old, came to help for awhile (with her mommy and daddy, too.)  Audrey was carrying rocks to the pallets for us.  I wish I'd gotten a picture of her first experience with her Crazy Rock Grandparents.

Then life got in the way again a few days later and we had to hustle off to work on something else, so Thing One remains forlornly half-disheveled in a heap of nothingness.  

And then it snowed.

 
 Snow is not unusual around here this late in the season, but our cold temperatures are breaking a few records at night and the snow isn't disappearing as quickly as it normally would.  

Snow Cone and Snow Balls

I really didn't want to go through all the work of putting the snowblower on by myself, so I walked up to the machine shed at Mom's and fetched the tractor.  

The tractor has nice, wide tires, so I simply drove around in circles, squashing the snow flat.

There, problem solved.  Until it snowed again, which it did, the next day.  Oh well, I'll just leave it be, we can still get out of the driveway, sort of.

For now, I'll go along with Carl's philosophy on snow removal: no matter what time of year it falls, up to and including January:

"Don't worry about it.  It will melt by July."