Blizzard 2011: (part 2) Don't laugh at us, we're Okies...

So, we are now in day three of the aftermath of the Blizzard of 2011. 

Depicted above is the street in front of my house looking east.  In the middle of the shot you can see one of my neighbors vehicles parked just short of their driveway.  This is a scene that has been sadly repeated all over the city of Tulsa.

Digging out has been an adventure.  It's more of an excavation, to be perfectly honest.  As I mentioned in the previous volume, some 14 inches officially fell on Tulsa three days ago.  What's weird is that a few miles north of the place where they officially measure the precipitation, some seven more inches fell.  Here at my house the amount before it consolidated was roughly 12.5-13 inches give or take.  As you move south, the amount is lesser but we are the beginning of a very long and wide footprint that extends from Oklahoma City to Michigan and points north and east.

This picture popped up on the internet today, and though it's hilarious it is so very descriptive.  The Great State of Oklahoma is effectively immobilized.  Trash service in Tulsa has been interrupted, our paper has not published for two days straight, and the courthouse and city hall have been closed down for the past two days.  Interstates and turnpikes have been closed down.  School has been called for the rest of the week also.  As I stated in my previous entry we are used to an average of 5-6 inches of snow PER YEAR.  In short, we are not prepared for this. Snowstorms like this happen everywhere else, but not here.

It's on the ragged edge of the melodramatic but it's hard to imagine what the ground looks like.  Yeah, I know...this stuff will melt eventually and I keep in mind that last August we hit 112 degrees for a high.  That's great, but last night at this time we were sitting at -2.  As in below zero.  You get both ends of the scale here, evidently.  It's not without a sense of dread that when spring rolls around that there is a distinct possibilty that I will be writing about the storms that Oklahoma is more famous for and hopefully, such a storm won't plow right through town like this one did.

The ironic part of all this is that Punxatawney Phil is predicting an early spring.  A certain meteorlogically challenged rodent didn't get a memo, apparently.