Snow Day

Despite the fact that I work from home, this has even become a snow day for me! Our drive was rapidly becoming impassable, and food was getting scarce, so I spent a large portion of the day shovelling. I nipped out for a grocery top up between snow showers so I think we'll see ourselves through the next few days of predicted snow showers. I'll have recovered enough by tomorrow to get on with my Gibside design then.

Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying the atmosphere that the snow creates. Our back garden looks beautiful, and has even been visited by a fox. It took off before I could get the camera ready but I am keeping an eye out for it in the meantime. I'm certainly not short of inspiration at the moment - just energy after several hours of hard labour on the end of a shovel.

This is the first real shovelling that I've had to do in over a decade. Having emigrated from Canada, I was more than happy to hang up my snow shovel. It sets the right atmosphere for Christmas and New Year but, to me, it feels a bit too much like work outside of that. The law over there insists on people clearing the walks and paths within a reasonable length of time. Trust me when I say that that gets rather irksome when you are shovelling after the third bad storm in the space of one week! The plow always managed to leave a 5 foot high by 5 foot deep snowbank composed of solid ice at the end of the drive after each pass too.

I was never keen to drive in the snow over there either, despite snow tyres and snowplows. And I'm even less keen to do so here because of the lack of them! So I'm quite content to stay put, take pictures of the snow in the garden, shovel at a sensible pace, and nip out for groceries when the road is clear enough to drive safely. I'll see about getting other snow pictures for new designs when the weather settles a bit more. Next time I'm out there, I might even make a snow angel...