What blizzard?

Oh yes, there are huge piles of snow around; if you're reading this before dawn, you can see by my temperature-indicator on the sidebar that it's well below zero.  However, most roads are passable now.  At noon yesterday, not all of them were.  
If you recall, yesterday morning found Cliff's sister's car still in a ditch.  

Here's what our nearest highway looked like from the cab of the old Ford pickup as we headed to the rescue.  Pretty, but not very good driving conditions.  

Rena's car looks rather lonely, doesn't it, sitting abandoned like that?  We saw lots of cars off the road in snowbanks, on our way back home.  

Cliff and Rena started digging with snow shovels.  I was just dying to help, I even begged.  But someone had to document this episode by taking pictures.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.  

Cliff found a spot where he could hook the tow chain.  He said his chain was too big to fasten securely; all he could do was hope it would hold.  

It did, and we were on our way home.  We turned around and went home a different way, since 24 highway was in much better shape than the road on which we had come.  

Piles like these are going to be around for quite a while, unless someone figures out some way to get rid of them.   
We survived, and lived to tell about it!

storm report

We weathered Snowmagedon, as they've labeled this storm.  It indeed lived up to its hype, at least in my neck of the woods.  I'll get out later and take some pictures of the drifts.  Some of them are huge, from what I can see outside in the dark with just the porch light shining.  I can only guess at the snowfall totals, thanks to the drifting; but we're thinking we got at least ten inches.  Locations to the east got even more.    
I-70 was closed across the state.  Cliff's place of employment never has snow days, but they had one yesterday and are having another one today.  Road crews couldn't work because visibility was zero, thanks to the blowing snow.  
I've actually enjoyed watching this storm outside my window and on television, although the fact that my sister-in-law's car is sitting in a ditch five miles from home is sort of a downer.  Cliff and the grandson, Arick, went to her rescue and got her home.  Cliff said he had never seen anything like it, with no way to see the road, and big drifts everywhere.  Rena works for one of those places that really doesn't care what happens to their employees; they expect them to show up.  They sent them home three or four hours early yesterday, but only because the highway in front of the place was being closed.      
My daughter spent last night at a motel near her work location; I'm glad, because even though her car gets around well in the snow, it's small, and would never have cleared the drifts; Cliff said Arick's big four-wheel-drive pickup barely plowed through some of them.
Looking at our ten-day forecast on weather.com, I see little hope for a real warmup in the immediate future.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this view from my sister's porch in Texas.  This was taken in February, the last time I visited her at her winter home.  The bad news is, upon checking the forecast down there, I see the temperature is supposed to get down to 28 tonight.  I wonder what that will do to her grapefruit tree?  It's supposed to warm up to the 70's there by this weekend.  

Pictures from around here

Notice how Iris is hugging the furnace vent.  She's no dummy.