Winter finally stopped teasing us and dumped 6″ of white fluffy happiness on our doorstep Sunday night. The joy began at 10:30pm, when Glyph’s school messaged that they would be closed on Monday. “They can’t take that back, can they?” asked a cautious but hopeful Glyph. “Nope,” Codex said.

Glad the ceiling could take the shrieks of victory. If you ever want to show a school official being a total jerk, you know what they’d have to do. “I’ve been informed that snow is racist,” they’d explain, “so we won’t be closing today after all. Anyone who can’t attend classes will be charged with a hate crime.”

This period in history can’t end soon enough.

Naturally, the power went out. We used to get power outages every couple of years during sustained wind storms (40mph+) or rare ice storms. Look up the winter of ’06. Everyone around here can tell you how many days they were without power. We went seven.

To fight this, the power company spent the last two summers cutting trees and trimming branches in the vicinity of the lines all over the countryside. As a result, the newly-exposed trees regularly fall in the face of a 5mph gust.

That’s why you keep a generator and plenty of fuel on hand around these parts.

We did all the traditional things you do during snow days. We put out a large mixing bowl the night before in an elevated position to make snow ice cream. You want fresh, pure-white snow for this. If your snow has foreign bits, especially yellow or brown ones, you should not process it. In fact, you should probably just toss the entire bowl.

We lost several trees, including a couple that I’ve wanted to remove for years now. Codex insisted they stay. I guess mother nature likes me more, despite all the fun I’ve made of her. Someone at one of the manly red pill blogs could probably delve into that one.

Believe it or not, deer can be an issue. We missed the most snow the area had ever seen a few years ago when 12″+ landed. When we got home, we discovered deer had used our front porch as a temporary shelter. I had to scrape away the, err, residue.

Of course, we wouldn’t be the oddball creative geniuses we are if we didn’t make something in the snow. While I was busy with generators and such, Codex and Glyph worked on a snow dragon!

By Monday night the snow was starting to develop that haggard look snow gets from all the activity, especially from the dogs. This was the first real snow for Calcifer, but he acted as though it was just another day of adventure in the back yard. In fact, I’m fairly sure we convinced him we’re magicians because we’d throw snow balls and, even though he could see them land, they would merely disappear!

Glyph is still wildly happy. They cancelled school again on Tuesday.