Sou'wester

Nancy and Jay had their Nor'easter recently. Yesterday, DOD and I had our Sou'wester.

Up here in the high country, as the next graphic indicates, there were 26 inches measured last night, 20 inches of it in 12 hours. That was accompanied by 50 mph sustained winds, gusting to 70 mph. While I was asleep we lost power, but I don't know for how long because all my clocks re-set automatically. I knew the outage was the case, though, when I heard my computer reboot as I was sleeping. The reboot woke me up, and I realized that there was also lightning. This graphic is from NOAA Tuesday morning--

We knew the storm was coming Monday morning. By noon on Monday, even though it was Finals Week at the University, all classes were canceled. This is unprecedented for Finals Week. The decision to cancel was most likely taken because blizzard warnings were posted. There haven't been blizzard warnings posted here in over a decade. And while 26 inches isn't really much of a newsmaker here -- last year, for instance, we had a 52-inch storm -- it was the combination of heavy snow and high winds that freaked people out here.

The University also canceled classes and exams for Tuesday as well for the reason that the brunt of the storm was to occur early Tuesday morning. The wind and snow tapered off quickly around 4 am, and when I went to the grocery store at 6:30 am, I took the following pictures before very much shoveling had been done. (Click on pictures to enlarge.)

Stepping out onto my front porch

The view toward market, from just under my balcony

The main entrance to my complex

Even the door knocker had a mantle of snow

Because work closed early Monday and all of Tuesday, I was able to enjoy a nice, quiet day-and-a-half in my cozy, warm home. Wednesday, that will be quite a different story as I head back to work to liberate the many vehicles in our fleet buried under snow.