It was an early morning for me this morning as I spent the time digging out from an ample amount of snowfall from last night. The official snowfall for my location was 17”, which I confirmed by measuring the snowfall in various locations at my home. I have included pictures below.

As I began to the job of clearing the snow, I noticed one van that had gone into the ditch on our private road. I pushed the snow blower over to the van, once I had my driveway cleared, and blew the snow back away from the van. I figured this would help the missing owner when he/she came back to retrieve the van. About 20 minutes later, along came a tow truck and the owner. I soon found out why the newspaper had not been delivered to various homes in our neighborhood… I am glad that we did not have to deal with any wind today as that would have added a lot more work to the morning snow cleanup.

Tonight was a night of sledding with the children, this lasted a whole ten minutes as the temperature had fallen to 1 F. We spent most of the time getting on boots, hats, coats, gloves. I cannot believe how long it takes to get winter clothing on children.

Someone could become very rich if they could invent a velcro/zipper/snap style suit that would have all of the winter accessories built in. I would envision it as a coat, insulated pants outfit with boots, scarf, gloves and hood all attached together. The user would lay the outfit on the floor, sit in it, pull the boots on, snap/zip/Velcro the legs and pants on, slip the coat part on and zip up. The scarf and hood would be together, wrap the scarf, pull the hood up. When the hands go in to the sleeves of the coat they fit in to the gloves at the end of the sleeves. Walla, the person is dressed for the winter weather in 30 seconds. The sleeves and legs of the winter garb would have to be expandable to fit different sizes and I am sure other items would have to be taken in to consideration for fitting vs different sizes. This would also stop the many mornings searching for the kids scarf, mittens, etc as they would all be integrated in to one super snowsuit. Then we could add a wireless internal temperature sensor that would have a receiver in the house to alert the parents when the children are getting cold.

Ok, so maybe I have been out in the snow too long today.