Fourteen inches of snow yesterday and last night here in Minnesota. Just spent an hour + cleaning out the driveway. A fresh cup of hot coffee to restore me and all is well. 
The Minneapolitans are in a panic: I can’t get thru to the MPLS Snow Emergency Hotline, which has been busy for at least an hour and a half. That’s the service that tells you where to park to accommodate the plowing schedule. Fortunately, I park off-street, so I don’t have to worry about getting towed once the plowing starts. 
Nano,
We’ve been in Minnesota for almost 20 years now but, have always lived out in the far suburbs. I never have figured out the weird and complex rules about parking during declared snow emergencies. Are they still different for Minneapolis and St. Paul?
Indeed they are. In Minnefunky, it’s the odd/even-numbered side of the street approach, and in St. Paul it’s the North-South/East-West running streets formula. Dunno how they figure for the diagonal ones. Always a good idea to call and find out where not to park; lines at the impound lot after big snowfalls are lo-o-o-o-ong and rueful.
It’s the real “Welcome to the Twin Cities” experience for new arrivals. 
I’ve been watching this Colorado Low coming in for the last couple of days. We are just starting to get the front edge of this, but for us it will be two days of freezing rain mixed with snow and ice. Oh joy! I see it has already fairly wopped Missouri and Arkansas, and more tornados are expected today.
Gosh! Can Spring be far away?
djm
Last night I watched outside my window as the snow gave way to the freezing rain which soon turned to rain. Hooray for the rain, which melts the snow and makes things grow. I had just gotten the street in front of my house cleared of ice and snow, only to find it completely parked with cars of my neighbors who haven’t removed the snow in front of their houses.
It’s beginning to look a lot like…we’re going to miss another day of school tomorrow, dagnabit.
I was all set to sand the upstairs hall, having finally gotten the floor components leveled and into submission, because then, after I got the kids kicked out of the house and off to school, I could polyurethane with reasonable assurance that no one larger than a 10 pound cat would accidently walk on it while it dried.
But snow has scotched that notion. At least for 24 hours.
What’s for dinner? I don’t know. Anyone wanna do an airdrop?
Hi Doug-- here’s a slightly surreal thought-- a collection of Tipple flutes in the snow might look like a scene from one of those nature shows with the arctic foxes and ptarmigans all but invisible. Alll you can see is their twinkly little eyes peeping out. Or in your case twinkly little tone holes
and embouchure holes.
PS enjoying the Giant B. I haven’t tried playing it in the snow yet 
It’s the flute I play to get my dose of humbling every day 
Very healthy-- improving my lungs and flexibility. Now I’m ready to get out there and shovel !!
Carolu
We got hit by a pretty bad ice storm yesterday. Nothing like what Walden described in Oklahoma, but worse than we’ve seen here in our town in about 20 years. It seemed like the ice was building up on things quite a bit and then I started getting a little scared when the first really big limb came down across the street—it sounded like a gun went off. Everyone has branches down, quite a few really big ones but no trees, and the electricity was off for a few hours, causing a lot of scurrying around for candles and firewood and heavy blankets, but I’ve not heard of any serious damage. The freezing rain changed to snow and that helped. It’s a little weird looking around outside and seeing so many branches down and so many broken still up in the poor trees, but at least no trees seem to have come down and I think they will be fine. The shoveling was hard—slush and ice. We had a lot of tree-trimming done to our very neglected trees last fall. That was a real lucky thing.
speaking of dear brother Walden…has anyone heard from him?
I don’t know if you guys have been tracking the weather report for my neck of the woods, but on Valentine’s Day, we got 20" of snow. The sad thing is, that’s more snow than what we got last year, and I live in MAINE! We’ve been having a snow drought for the past few years. VERY BAD for our economy. 
But the old folks find it’s a wonderful change of pace. 
I’m melting! I’m melting!
Sounds like the weather has been a real source of danger and difficulty
for you guys. Here, we had just enough snow to be pretty for two
days. My son Kevin (who took the above photos) is really bummed that
the snow is melting. His Tipple-playing snowman is bummed too.
Today the sun is shining brightly and even the largest snowpiles
are rapidly melting away. Here’s prayers and good wishes to you-all who
are still buried in the white stuff. I am terrified of driving in the snow / ice
and it must make life really difficult when the snow has been there
day after day after day!
Trying to imagine it, I can’t
I will now go off and play “The Snowy Path” in honor of you all…
Carolu
We are finally getting some winter weather here just south of Tahoe. I plan on a big snow trip this weekend, finally!
I can’t imagine the kind of weather you guys are getting! I have had a solid day of rain here after about a month of weird, warm conditions.
Take care out there everyone!
I also have been wondering about our Chiffmaster General.
Your poor snowman! He had such a promising career.
There are still people in our town without power----I hadn’t realized it was quite so bad. Luckily it isn’t terribly cold, the temperature is just below freezing, so the people without heat seem to be managing even if they aren’t comfortable. I ran some errands yesterday and there has been a lot of damage to trees—some will have to be cut down entirely which is sad because the trees are one of the main beautiful things in our town. Every yard has a pile of branches and many are still dangling from the trees. It seems that there hasn’t been any major damage to homes or people, so that is good. Yesterday it was sunny and the ice on the trees and shrubs was shining so brightly you could hardly look at them. It looked like everything had a coating of silver or mercury on it. You can hear the ice on the trees crackling when the sun shines on it and chunks are falling off, which is good because it lightens the load on the branches. Our roads are fine now, but walking is hard because of the ice on the walks—you’re better off walking in the snow really.
In the fall when we had our trees trimmed the city said one tree, which was on the parking strip and thus belongs to them, would have to be cut down. It was a huge, huge hackberry tree and it had signs of rotting although you couldn’t really tell how much of the tree was affected. I asked them if there was anything we could pay to have done to make it safer and they seemed to feel there wasn’t and I felt I couldn’t really argue about it since I just didn’t know. It was so heartbreaking to see it go—it took two whole days to take it down, they used ropes and pulleys and you could feel the ground shake when big logs hit the ground, it was a mighty, mighty tree and it was just helpless— but I sure would have been worried about it during the storm.
I was going through some old Cat Stevens albums and this one
made me think of you, Cynth–
He was the King of Trees, keeper of the leaves
a deep green god of young love stained memory
we used to meet by him, far from the hustling town
I loved you, now they’ve come to cut you down.
He was the guardian of days we held the same
beneath the shade he gave shelter from the rain
Oh Lord how it’s empty now with nothing save the breeze.
I loved you, now they’ve come to burn the leaves…
Hope the ice is melting and things are getting back to
normal out your way
Snow Revisited
Yesterday and last night we had about 16-18 inches of snow. Kind of hard to tell this time because fairly strong winds drifted it to over three feet deep in spots. Just spent 2 hours cleaning out the driveway this time. Having a fresh cup of coffee to restore me again. All will also be well (if a bit tired) again. Quite beautiful by the way.
You wouldn’t make it here in Maine! 
Awww… thanks! That is one of my favorites! 
BTW- Those snowman pics are too funny! 
The words to that song are really good. Very much how it felt—very empty now.
Things are much better here—most power back on and main roads open. Iowa got hit pretty hard again on top of the ice storm by that second storm peteinmn was talking about, although my town just had a little snow and a lot of wind. Some areas had up to 17 inches of snow and blizzard conditions. The trucks on I-80 were gotten off the road and into a shopping mall parking lot in Des Moines—there were over 400 semis waiting out the storm there! In our town they will start collecting tree limbs tomorrow. If you can drag it to the curb they will pick it up—that is good news since I thought probably we would have to cut our branches into pieces. So we dragged everything to the curb. Luckily we don’t have anything we can’t drag. I hadn’t realized at the time how bad things were further south with all those tornadoes. There’ve been a lot of problems across the state but not like the deaths and destruction caused by those tornadoes.