The Ohio Experience

It took us an hour, crawling on all 4 wheels, a grand total of around 2 miles. Pepper and I went on a teambuilding dinner at But guess what? They were closed, due to weather (not enough employees able to get to work). Gee. The manager on duty was nice enough to give us some coupons for our next visit, and recommended alternative (and open) establishments. So we went drove 100 meters over the snow banks in the parking lot to
They got all the re-directs from closed restaurants in the area, apparently. There, I had semi-nice dinner with excellent dinner companions This aren't my companions, but they did keep my strip steak company for a while. It was the first time I had a infra-red seared steak that was raw on the inside, seared on the outside, and cool all the way around. Strange american steaks... :-)

Walking gut-stuffed from the restaurant, we walked sinus-first into my first-ever Ohio Blizzard!
Here's what it looked like:

Oh yeah right. I was too bundled up to take a pic. When:

• snow is blowing parallel to the ground, and snow clumps are flying clumsily into your ear, rattling chillingly around for a minute before finally settling on your eardrum. Ow?!
  
• snowflakes are abraiding your face, driven by 35 mph winds. Not only that, they're also being driven so hard, they're changing directions every few seconds, blowing themselves into your nostrils, around your specs, into your ears and up your pant legs, right up into the sensitive groin area. BBrrrrRR!
  
• wind-blown snowbanks prevent you from driving your car out of the parking space
• driving snow reduces visibility to 50 meters, and covering cars so that they look like large snow banks lying innocently around all over the place. So's you can't tell if you're still in the lot, or already on the freeway...
  

there's no time to take pictures! Thanks to great and safe driving, pepper and I got back safely. Thanks Ralph and Dave!
This is the first time I've seen this much snow blow up into our sheltered lobby entrance:
Waking up this Valentine's day morning, this is what the howling, whistling, window-rattling winds brought me:
Snow on the inside of my window.. (no, it's not white sponge — you're looking at sieved snowflakes)