Relative Something

The weather played out just like the forecasters predicted. Overnight Sunday into Monday the snowflakes flew with an unrelenting intensity. I woke in the middle of the night and saw it was piling up to an impressive depth on the deck railing out back.

It started to change over to a mixture of rain and snow a couple of hours before sunrise. I knew the moment I stepped outside yesterday morning the snow was the consistency of wet cement.

Two of the horses stayed totally dry. The other two looked totally wet. They all appeared to be coping just fine.

I grabbed a shovel and headed down toward the road. I wanted to see how deep the snow was on the driveway and check on the mailbox that usually gets blasted by snow shooting off the blade of the township plow truck.

Just as I stepped out of the barn, I heard the truck coming. I was not going to get there in time to save the mailbox. Luckily, it wasn’t an issue. The driver was working at a controlled speed to push the slop to the side, not throw it well off into the ditches. The mailbox was fine.

The snow depth on the driveway was borderline worth plowing. The challenge would be all the water saturating the bottom couple of inches.

I decided to try running the Grizzly ATV up and down the driveway to disrupt the sloppy covering of snow, half hoping it might be enough to make it easily navigable by cars.

The ATV tracks made it look easy enough to plow so I went for it and lowered the blade at its sharpest angle. I don’t know that it made it any easier but the pavement cleaned up nicely in just a handful of slip-sliding passes.

I wasn’t going to even try the plow blade around the hay shed. I made multiple passes to break up the snow and called it good enough. When we went down to feed the horses at dinner time, there was standing water in many of those tire tracks.

Based on evidence on the ground in the paddocks, several, if not all of the horses, did some lying down in that soaking wet mess with their blankets on. Well, blankets mostly on. Swings managed to fold hers over off her butt.

You can see her back foot standing on the dragging blanket making it hard to move forward. That area just beyond the overhang is even more like wet cement with the combination of sand and saturated snow. The back corner of Swings’ blanket is a mud-saster.

Too bad she’s not one to stand out in the rain. Some precipitation might help rinse off all the muck.

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