Winter Storm Achilles: Damage Via Snow

 Achilles.

That's the winter storm that is hitting the Midwest, right now.

The plan today was to tell you about how excited I was because I managed to successfully overwinter my daughter's strawberry garden.

Yay for Super-me!!!

Stick drawing of a female superhero in a red cape.


Unfortunately, last night Mother Nature decided to plop a wee bit of snow on top of them.

Earthbox with 5 inches of snow piled on top

Ok... maybe a lot.

Fortunately, I had a heads-up, and so I was able to take most of my plants back inside.  The cucumbers, tomatillos, and strawberries were a bit too large to bring inside, though, so I just covered them and hoped for the best.  We'll see how that goes.

The snow was pretty thick and heavy.  This means that yet again I had a yard full of dead, fallen branches.  This time, though, there were more of them.

Yet again, there were branches covering the treacherous trail up the hill,


large branch fallen across a trail leading up a hill




But this time there were several that had fallen from the huge maple at the front corner of the driveway...

Fallen Branches covering a section of driveway.
and an entire pussy willow even managed to take a nosedive at some point before I woke up, this morning.

Fallen pussy willow, circled in red. Red arrow pointing to it from words reading "My Poor Pussy Willow..."
Poor thing...

So I think it's safe to say that it was a pretty intense storm that traveled over Southern Minnesota (as well as Iowa and Wisconsin, last night... and it's still blowing!  Kansas City should see it tomorrow.

Yikes!

There are great video reports on weather.com that deal with it. We were actually pretty lucky.  Just 18 miles away, in Owatonna, 15 inches of snow fell.

Dang!

I puzzled over how this could be called a winter storm.  I mean, this is spring, right?

Somehow, I think Minnesota didn't get the memo.

I went out to shovel the five-ish inches of snow that we got, but didn't get very far.  See, the temperatures got a bit warmer, which means that snow was beginning to fall from trees at a pretty fast rate, and in large amounts. 

Not a big deal... at least, not until I looked up and saw that the power lines above me were overloaded with snow.

Three snow covered power lines. Snow thickness of about 3 inches.

I moved pretty quickly, and was glad I did, because moments later the snow all fell at once, and the power lines resembled a few jump ropes being swung about 'double dutch' style.  They didn't snap, thank goodness, but they could have.

Since this is Winter Storm Achilles, I'm trying to figure out where its heel is... 

What's the weather like in your area?

















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