OMG! Will It NEVER Stop?

Yesterday, I wrote that I was a little worried about my roof falling in. I was actually kidding on the square, with a little more kidding than square. Then, I went to the gym. The gym has a flat roof, too, where manly muscled men heaved big heaps of snow to the sidewalks below*

When I returned from the gym, I found this scene on the roof across the street:

That's a team of workers trying to shovel snow off of the roof of the shopping center before the storm sets in. As you can see from the lack of piles near the ground by the building, they seem to be just moving the snow about. The storm began during the time I took this picture and the time that I de-saltified in the shower. These guys were still out there, vainly trying to keep the accumulation to a minimum.

They aren't out there anymore, by the way.

This morning, the county sent out an alert that people should not try shoveling snow off of their rooves for fear of falling off. I was perfectly willing to go on top of our building yesterday to avoid the inconvenience of having a ceiling and 6 feet of snow on my floor. As I wrote, our buildings have flat rooves:

Being an alleged 20 floors up with gust of wind blowing over SUVs** and forcing snow plows off the road, I think I'll risk the snowy living room. Still, I'm a little more square now, and a little less kidding.

Here is the tennis court below. The middle net has almost disappeared, as have all of the dog trails and the fleur de lis:

Here is the horizon to the west:

Here is the horizon to the north:

Here is the parking lot:

What I think we have here are white-out conditions, like I read about in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. That book is my reference point for winters after having grown up in the deep south. Well, that and an early childhood in Minnesota and Iowa. When you are two feet high and the snow drifts are two feet high, your perception of snowfalls gets a bit warped.

Growing up in the deep south, having those memories of the far north, and wishing that my life resembled some archetype of normal as depicted in Currier & Ives or Norman Rockwell or even Little House on the Prairie, I desperately wanted to live in a place with snow. Lots of snow! Lots of snow days! Lots of snowmen and snowballs and sledding and cross-country skiing. Trust me, September in southeast Texas will make you long for days like the ones I depicted above. Anything but sweltering, melting heat!

Now, I think that I'm living in a big, wet case of being careful what you wish for.

*Because, as this Washington Post article that Roxie pointed out reports, teh menz just LURVE shovelling snow. It makes them feel butch. I sense a writer getting snowbound and trying to sucker someone else in her household into clearing the sidewalks.

**HA! Serves them right for thinking that they are exempt from disaster in their big ole gas-guzzlers. In fact, if this storm is a product of global warming, then overturned SUVs seem almost poetic justice.***

***I don't have issues with SUVs, do I?