Texas Blizzard of Twenty-Ten

I haven't lived in Texas my whole life, so I do know that what we had last week wasn't technically a blizzard.  However, I also know that as far back as records go, there has never been 12" of snow recorded in one day in the DFW area.  Until last week, that is!  What is truly amazing is that this is not the first snowfall of the year.  Considering we usually don't get any snowfall, or if we do it falls and melts within hours, this is an event worth posting about!

I really never thought I'd have a picture of my house looking quite like this!

The snow was so heavy and wet that it weighed down all the trees.

In fact, about 1/3 of all the trees in the DFW area sustained damage from this snow storm.  In our yard, we were fortunate to only lose half of a tree.

When looking closely, it became clear that this tree was hit by lightening at some point which weakened it.  I don't think it would have fallen if not for this big charred spot giving it a weak point to split.

We were also fortunate that when it fell, it did not hit our house.  However, it did block the entire street, so the fire department came to cut and move it for us. 

We were wondering how we were going to get it out of the street since we do not own a chain saw.  It took the men on this truck, plus a crew from the streets department to finally get the tree moved enough to allow access for emergency vehicles!

Not many vehicles even tried to make it through, though.  Our car got stuck in our alley because the snow was too deep for the wheels to stay in contact with the road.  Fortunately we had a snow shovel from when we lived in the mid-west.  We just had to go into the attic to get it down!  But then Jerry was able to shovel off our drive and into the alley, plus he had to shovel from under the car to get the car into the garage!  The mail tried to deliver on Thursday, but after our mail lady slid into our mail box, knocking it off the foundation, she called it quits until Saturday!  See how the box is diagonal to the road now?  See all that snow on top of it?

The tree and mailbox weren't our only casualties.  Jerry and I were both out in the snow at some point during the day.  As it melted off our cars in our garage, we discovered that the foundation of the garage slopes toward the house rather than away from it when we noticed the carpet in the boys room was soaking wet!  Within a day the room smelled of mold and mildew, despite our efforts to soak up as much of the water as we could, so we had to pull up the carpet, remove the padding, spray everything with bleach, and let it all air out.  Hopefully we'll be able to put it all back down and not have to replace it all.

Do you think our neighbors liked our method of drying the padding?

Even with the damage, we all had fun in the snow.We built the biggest snowball we could roll, an Aaron got out his aggression beating it with a baseball bat.

We built an igloo...

which got destroyed in a snowball fight.

The boys made snow cars and snow thrones.

Don't my little snow kings look like they are having fun?