"yuki-sukashi"

What is "yuki-sukashi" you ask?
Well, it's pronounced more like "yoo-kee skashee" and it's Japanese for shoveling snow. That's all we have been doing this last few weeks, and I'm not exaggerating!

icicles hanging off the straggly little shrub outside our front door

There has been a stupid amount of snowfall over the last few weeks. Liz wrote about the snow over New Years, but it just hasn't really lifted up since that! In fact, it's almost worse in some ways. They don't have "snow days" here. No matter how much snow there is, everyone still has to drive through it to get to work. There ARE snow plows out on the roads, but there aren't enough of them, and they don't do a fantastic job either. If you need to be at work by 8:30am, and the snow plows don't get to those roads before 9am, then you just have to drive through the snow. Yes, there are many accidents.
Poor Liz has to drive the winding narrow roads to Amino every morning. What would ordinarily take 40 minutes, sometimes takes her an hour and a half in the snow!! It's not so bad for me, because I can walk to work, but it's not an easy walk in the blizzard through knee-deep snow! haha. Of course, it's not like that every day, but much more often than we would like!

So, getting back to "yuki-sukashi" (clearing snow), that's what we have been doing almost every morning and evening. Today we had about a foot of fresh snow, so I went out and dug a path from our front door, and then I dug out the car. We have a severe snow warning in place, AGAIN, and it's set to snow all night and all day tomorrow, too!!

making progress on my path to the front door

neighbour's car which hasn't been dug out!

This is why we haven't been up to much, and we haven't been updating the blog much lately. Sorry about that. When you find yourself wondering what we're up to, just picture us with a show shovel in hand, digging out the car, and you're probably spot on!