Average Jane vs. the Snow

So there was a huge snowstorm here on Christmas Eve. Once we'd slid our way home from dinner, we kept an eye on weather updates online and, particularly while I was up with stomachache-related insomnia at 3:30 a.m., it looked as though our Christmas Day commute to my sister's house was not going to happen.

Once I finally woke up for good, I decided to give it a go. After all, I had already made a ton of food and my little car gets around in the snow pretty well.

Our driveway slants downward into the garage from the street at a fairly significant angle, so backing up it in the snow has always been a chore. It was worse back in the days when the driveway was made of cracked asphalt, so it helps that it's now concrete and has predictable boundaries.

Of course I had to shovel. I made parallel paths through the snow all the way up to the street, which was exhausting and made me sweat off my makeup and hairdo. Even with a path cleared, it still took me a couple dozen attempts to launch myself up to the street. From there on out, I was the living embodiment of "taking it easy" on the road. I made the usually 30-minute drive in less than an hour.

I helped my sister with the meal, opened gifts with the family and snacked on all of the goodies all afternoon. My husband joined us right before dinner and said he'd gotten his SUV out of the driveway in one try with no shoveling. Hmmph.

My aunt, uncle and cousin couldn't make it because they live on a rural road that didn't get plowed right away. We're hoping to be able to get together with them sometime this weekend or possibly next week to exchange gifts.

We left before it started getting dark and had a significantly more difficult time getting home than we had getting there. My brother-in-law had to push my car out of their cul-de-sac, and I got hung up at an intersection trying to leave their subdivision and had to make a number of attempts before I freed my car.

Once we got home, I was exhausted and took a long nap. I woke up and made a tasty batch of spaghetti out of random ingredients we had in the pantry and we ate while watching "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," thus completing our annual trifecta of holiday movies which included earlier viewings of "Elf" and "Bad Santa."

This morning I awoke determined to get to the store for some groceries. All night long, it had continued to snow and drift. There was no way I was going to try to get my own car out, so I took my husband's Honda Element. It took at least a dozen tries, but I finally got out of the driveway and made it to the grocery store.

Here's what the driveway looks like now:

Note the drifts on the right-hand side, which my tiny little Honda Insight would have to plow through. It's just not going to happen.

My office is closed all next week, so I went ahead and got the ingredients for a variety of meals, including stuffed peppers, tacos, homemade pizza, stir-fry, and chicken noodle soup. Chili, meatloaf and potato soup are also possibilities. I grabbed two half-gallon bottles of milk, assuming we'd want it for cereal and baking, and I replenished our rapidly-diminishing coffee supply.

We know two guys with snowplows who live nearby, so odds are we'll get our driveway plowed today or tomorrow. Still, I wanted to be able to hole up and have tasty food choices in case another blizzard makes its way through.

Did you have a White Christmas? Was it merely pretty or was it as much of a pain as ours?