The snow blizzard on Dec 19, 2009

Every local network's weather center forecasted a major snowstorm on Dec 19. It started snowing lightly in the early morning of Saturday when most of us were asleep.

By morning, the scenery was transformed overnight into a wintry snowscape, though officially, the Winter Solstice began on Dec 21 at 12.47 pm EST.

Initially, it felt kind of romantic with pretty snowflakes falling as I looked out from my warm apartment. However, as it continued to snow without abate and gusty wind picking up, it became scary. Cars were sliding on roads and pedestrians had to walk in knee-deep snow. This was the longest snow storm I had experience since I was here.

By Sunday Dec 20, the blizzard had stopped and everything was covered in snow. My balcony had snow dunes where it was 9 inches at the highest dune.

A cool idea struck me and I began building my first snowman, Feisty with the snow on the balcony. The snow was very dry, not conducive for make a snowball, let alone, a snowman. To overcome this, I sprayed water on the snow as I built. Ideally, you would need to form a snowball initially and then roll the ball around in sticky/wet snow. Imagine animation of cartoon characters rolling down a slope and forming a large snowball.

In this case, I made two snowballs, one for the body and the other for the head. I sat the body on a chair and added snow to it, layer by layer after spraying with water to cement the dry snow. After building the body to a sizable scale, I flatten the top of the body to place the second snowball and started working on the head. Since I had no carrot for its nose, I compressed some snow into a rod and stuck it in. The mouth was a red chilli, eyes were star aniseed, and buttons were dried flower pods from a potpourri. Instead of bundling it up with my cashmere scarfs, as pointed out by Charlene, I used two rags. To complete the look, Feisty, as I called it, was decorated with various hats (see Snow Blizzard album).

Then, I went outside, armed with a measuring tape to measure snow accumulation of the storm. The deepest was at 26 inches. There was this car, completely covered in snow but had a clearing on its driver's side, carved out by wind.

As the snow was deep, I could not resist making snow angels. The last time I made a snow angel, my jeans got dirty because the snow was not deep enough. Not this time, it was 13 inches deep.

I proceeded towards Sherwood Garden to take wintry pictures. Along the way, I saw private house owners busy shoveling their walkways or digging cars out. There were children sledding down a slope.

Houses covered in snow with Christmas decorations make great Holiday pictures. I walked around to capture the scenery but I did not last long as my feet were freezing after getting snow into my boots.

Five days later after the storm, Feisty was fighting to stay frozen. It needed some nose job and half its head was deformed. Things were falling apart. Well, as the saying goes, when a door closes, another opens. A row of icicles were hanging from the roof which looked fantastic. Let's see how long Feisty is going to last.

Blessed Christmas to you and wishing you joy, health and peace in 2010.

Snow Blizzard album