I'm glad we left the gate open. Otherwise, we would have had a lot more shoveling to do. I had shoveled the whole walk all at 11PM the night before. This was a suggestion of the news station to prevent having to do all the work at once. It did no good.

You can see the shadow of the snow on the roof indicating how deep it is. Later in the afternoon after more snow came down the wind picked up. I spent a good bit of the day attempting to remove snow from the power line to keep it from coming down. Two of the lines coming into the house had been knocked down by a branch over night. The power line remained up, but there was a heavy branch leaning on it. The branch was just heavy with snow, not actually broken. We still have all of our services, but the weight of the snow is very heavy.

Two of the utility lines are down. The third has a limb leaning on it.

This gives some scale to the depth of the snow. This is what we waded through every time we left the main sidewalk. These are the tools I wielded to try to knock the snow off the straining branches. Later I took Alazar and Ruth down the street and found we were about 1/8 of a mile from a plowed road! Busses are not running, neither is most of the subway here in DC. The weirdest event of the day I didn't get a picture of. I was checking out the scene in the evening about 7PM. I saw some weird flashing lights in the woods. I thought it was a reflection of a police cruiser or ambulance from Sligo Creek Parkway. I watched as a figure emerged from the woods. I realized it had all the hallmarks of a commuter cyclist. The guy was carrying his bike through 2 feet of snow. I called out to him. He told me the roads were okay except for the most immediate area of our neighborhood. I had been beaten out as the first guy out cycling after a snowstorm. He didn't stop to chat, but I look forward to seeing another hardcore cyclist in the neighborhood.