It started around 10:15 AM yesterday and was light enough during the day that I could have easily gone to work, but even with lighter volume the traffic would have been a risk - too few people know how to drive in bad weather around here.

It's very wet, fluffy snow, and still coming down. 29 degrees F, so it's still sticking. We're not supposed to get too much more though, so I doubt we'll break 20 inches around here (the forecasts were saying up to 30" in some areas).

We lost our power around 10:00 last night after about a dozen flickering episodes. Lots of blue and yellow flashes in the sky as the transformers complained. It was back on about 6 hours later (quicker than I thought).

Our power company has a neat Flash map of locations with outages - http://outagemap.dom...Viewer/index.html

Here's a web camera (from somewhere within a few miles of here) showing a condensed movie of the last day or so. http://www.wundergro...ename=current.flv

The WP is saying some areas west of here have 25" already - http://www.washingto...id=topbar_hottips

I'm trying to get motivated to get out and shovel some paths. I'm not quite there yet. ;-) Maybe in an hour or so.

Cheers,
Scott.

Thanks for the good wishes. It's been fun...

We lost our power again around 11:30 yesterday, and it was off about 11 hours. The home cooled off to about 57 degrees before it came back. We stayed plenty warm with various goose-down comforters and such. We've got a fireplace, but they're mainly decorative (and not too good for warming a house anyway).

We spent yesterday and much of today shoveling. It's an amazing amount of snow. I measured 24.5" in our front yard this afternoon. The actual amount of snow that fell was probably higher - there were places I cleaned off on our deck that later had 6" of fresh snow but the unshoveled areas didn't seem any thicker. The snow is heavy enough that it just seems to compress the underlying stuff more...

We cleaned off our cars today. It got close to freezing so the sunlight helped speed up the process.

We only got our cable TV and internet back about 30 minutes ago. The cable had been down at least 12 hours. Withdrawal symptoms were pretty strong! =8-(

Even with all the outages and so forth, we've been pretty lucky. We just got back from our evening walk and at least half of the streets in the areas we normally walk are still without power. There are outages even in an area where the power lines are underground, which surprised me.

Barometers are neat. I once found an old surplus one that was filled with mercury. It can be incredibly accurate, but there are several offsetting adjustments that need to be made - e.g. http://www.npl.co.uk...28faq-pressure%29 . I'm glad that you did't need to mess with those things!

Have fun.

Cheers,
Scott.