Yes, it snowed here

Looks like we wound up with about 18" of new stuff Tuesday night and Wednesday, on top of about 10" left from the weekend (we got about 15" in that storm and it melted and settled down about 5" since Saturday).
First snowfall was wet and heavy, about 6"; we shoveled that Wednesday morning, and then there was just some spitty sleet till about noon. I drove into Newtown, roads weren't too bad; looked around a bit, had a Pretty Things Baby Tree at Isaac Newton's, then went home and "avoided travel" as the State Police started to advise.

That's when the snow started again, and by about 3 we were getting almost 2" an hour. First branches broke off the pine trees around 4; I'd been shaking them, but couldn't keep up (I was getting out there using the paths Penderyn had made through the snow!). We lost power for about a minute around 6:00 and got nervous, but that was all that happened. (Over 100,000 are out of power in the area.) Cathy thinks it's because we live across the street from the hospital. The snow pretty much petered out around 9:00. About 10:00 there was a sound like a gunshot out back; I think that's when the big branch broke off the pine; there was a 6" one down this morning without much snow drifted over it.

We shoveled for about an hour this morning to get the driveway clear (our neighbor did the sidewalks with his snowblower; gotta get him a sixpack!), and I made the mistake of taking the Jetta out to get the snow off it out in the road...didn't I get it stuck just as the ambulance that had been sitting down the street for half an hour wanted to leave? Yes, I did.

Panic ensues, shovels fly, Cathy remembered a bag of sand in the garage, and I managed to get it up the street into a clear driveway I'd seen when I was out taking pictures at sunrise. I left it there, the ambulance left, we shoveled the driveway wider, and I got the Jetta back in without further problems. And Cathy never even said "I told you so," which she had.
Never did get the high winds, they stayed south. It's just sunny and pretty now, and the snow's falling off the trees. No school, of course, they're still plowing, and Cathy's working from home. I'm still writing the book, just taking a break.

Like a 5,000 pound pig getting slaughtered...

I was down at Yards about 11 AM today, getting ready to interview Tom Kehoe and Steve Mashington for PA Breweries 4, when there was a hell of a noise that stopped conversation dead in its tracks. It sounded like a gigantic animal screaming, a horrifying sound. We all looked to the brewery -- well, "we", Tom and Mash were already gone, running down the stairs. We would later agree that our first thought had been that a tank had somehow collapsed.

But it was two windows that had blown out. These are the windows around the brewery walls, about eight feet high: two sections blew out, one about 12 feet, the other about 18. The local storm was about at its peak at the time (it had almost wrenched the car door out of my hand when I arrived), and we figured it blew in the window you see in the second picture (the glass was inside), and then the shift in pressure as the wind then blew into the brewery blew the second window out. There was an icestorm of glass on the back street behind the brewery...but no one was rushing to clean it up, because the window next to it was bowed out at the bottom.

I had thought these "windows" were rippled plexi, but as you can see in the third picture, they're glass, almost half an inch thick, and wire-mesh reinforced ("The most brutal glass I've ever seen," Tom said, recalling when they had to cut a hole in one of them).

But there was almost no slack in work. The bottling plant on the other side of the building continued to clatter along. Guys grabbed palletjacks and moved some barrels and kegs that were getting rained on, and calls were made to insurers and contractors and "glass guys"... And a soaking wet Mashington sat me down at the bar (of the new tasting area, very nice, very casual), and said, "Let's do the interview." So we did. Life -- and beer -- goes on.