Self-Portrait & Shovelling & Sentiments

8:30am and I'm heading outside. Welcome to Canada, folks!

It's like shovelling silica gel out there! The snow is heavy, but not too dense. The end of the driveway was a little tricky when the plow went by. Good exercise, though. K and I had to shovel the top of a snowbank 6 feet south a couple of times. As we piled the snow up, it began to slide back at us. Not only that, but the bank at the end of the drive was as tall as I was and I figure that's an unsafe obstruction when I'm sitting in my car trying to pull into traffic.

I love having a lot of snow. First, it's insulating and who doesn't like to be warm?? It reminds me of when I was little, living 'in der valley', the Ottawa Valley, that is. We lived in a tiny town on a dead end in suburbia. I must have been very short as all I remember of winters there are the snowbanks. The plows would pile the snow up well above my head. My similarly statured friends and I would walk to school on the snow banks, enjoying the slide down to street level every time we came to a driveway that had been shovelled. Of course, then we had to climb back up. The exciting part was never knowing when you would plunge, hip deep down into the snowbank. Risk-taking, adrenaline junkie 6 year olds that we were. It's been a long time since I remember seeing snow like that. Today reminded me of taller-then-my-head snowbanks.