Here are some pictures from the snow the week before Christmas.  They posted in a different order than I meant for them to, but I'm new.  The bottom one is in front of our house and I'm holding a chunk of snice (snow/ice).  This is what made it so bad out.  It had snowed, and then we had some freezing rain and then it snowed some more, before anything could thaw.  It shut down the city.  They don't have the resources in place to deal with this amount of snow.  They had to have plows come down from the mountain to help deal with it.  Of course, no one knows how to drive in these conditions.  Some of the people that got themselves in the most trouble were the ones that thought they were good, because their car had 4 wheel drive and snow tires.  They thought it made them invincible.  I saw a little honda driving by a stuck 4x4 several times. 

One of the really fun days, (not sarcastically) was the day in the photos were Addy and I called in because the roads near us were closed.  It was the first snow day of her life.  She's from southern Oregon and they are usually about 5 degrees warmer than us in Portland.  Which is just enough to keep them from getting snow the rare times that Ptown does.  The second pic is just of us out on a walk down the middle of the street.  We took the dog, Jackson, with us and he loved being out and about in the snow.  We walked down to our favorite neighborhood cafe, Arleta Library, and let him be off leash and just had a great morning.  On the way back Addy and Jackson decided to make snow angels (3rd pic).  Jackson's looked pretty funny, but they had fun.  

The last pic is of me digging out when we decided that it wasn't going to melt away soon and we needed to start going to work.  The local news networks had been running weather reports for 24 hrs straight and were calling the storm the "Arctic Blast".  From them we know that this was the worst snowstorm that Portland has seen since the '70s.  The city struggled to get unburied and back to work.  The highways had wicked bad ruts in them.  The tires on your car would just stay in the ruts like you were on a track.  It was actually kind of dangerous to change lanes.  They had to shut down the highways, bit by bit, to have the plows come through and clean it up.  All I had to dig out was my spade shovel, so it took way longer than it should have and I was very sore the next day.  

Even though the snow caused us some headaches and played havoc at work, this day with Addy made all the rest worth it.  We just had a lot of fun and enjoyed this rare occurrence in a carefree way.  Hope you can tell.