This is a real winter - an honest to goodness blizzard. It's not clear if there were records broken but it's dramatic enough for me. The weather people, led by Tom Skilling on WGN channel 9, warned us for almost a week ahead of time that a big storm was coming and it did - right on schedule, beginning at 3 pm Tuesday, 1 Feb. We had been to the store to buy milk and eggs and to the petrol pump to fill up with gas in the car and in a "jerry can" so that Jack could run the snow blower. The wind was horrific and scary. At about 8 pm we realized that our front windows (really doors looking out at the Lake) were not fully latched and snow was blowing in and the door was straining and threatening to blow open. We managed to open the door, bolt it at the bottom where it was unlatched and with both of us pushing got it shut again against the 60 mile-an-hour wind gusts. We then took rags and using a screw driver filled in all the cracks around the outside of the door. When we finished we could not hear the wind whistling into the room any more or feel snow coming in. The last big blizzard, in 1999, we had a foot of snow on the floor in the morning that had blown through the old doors at the window. The doors and windows were all replaced in 2000 so the very idea that could happen again was scary to say the least. This morning it was great to go out and tramp up and down the street - the drifts are fantastic shapes, fanciful and gorgeous. Most of the cars have no snow on them - just big swirls and spikes of snow surrounding them. It's still snowing but the wind has diminished. There is really not a view of Lake Michigan at all - just white, white, white as far as you can see.
