Here’s a few shots of what early March was looking like in my yard on Tuesday.

 And Wednesday morning we woke up to this:

Lots of heavy white stuff.

About this much of it:

Okay, so the owl isn’t a good indication of how much snow we got, but I thought it looked cute with it’s little snow cap.

Needless to say, schools were closed and because of the weight of the snow, there were many downed tree branches and power lines.  Our beloved pink dogwood in the front yard lost a few limbs – mostly smaller ones at the top – we were lucky there. We lost a huge limb off a tulip popular in the back yard, the oak lost some limbs and there are still roads closed around town due to downed trees. We have a gas stove and hot water heater, so we had coffee, hot showers and hot food.  We didn’t have heat, but as the temperature hovered above freezing and we don’t keep our house terribly warm anyway, that wasn’t too awful. Wednesday night after dinner, the three of us climbed into our bed upstairs with books & flashlights and curled up for the night. 

I have to say, I immensely enjoyed the snow day.  Already, spring and the busy schedule that seems to be our norm for that time of year has kicked in.  This unexpected holiday was the last big hunk of time the three of us are going to have together for at least a month, if not more.  The rest of March is about to be insanely busy for me – I have lots of exciting projects that I will be talking about over the next few months.  A day unplugged where I had no excuse to not sit curled up with a book and my family was pretty delightful.  As I was waking up to Day 2 No Power wondering if I could do another day, the power came back on, we were able to run the dishwasher we had spent all day Wednesday regretting we forgot to run before going to bed Tuesday night, I popped the lemon cheesecake buns I had ready to go into the oven and we enjoyed another day unplugged, for while we had power, we had no cable or internet.  We worked some more on our 1000 piece puzzle that is taking over the dining room table, we watched some movies.  It was a nice farewell to winter, a most welcome chance to catch our breathe before we hit the ground running for the next few weeks and months…..