The bunny hop

The view down the street tends to be obscured by the mountains of snow
that have piled up in space between the road and the sidewalk.

Let's start with the rabbits.

You can tell they are around. Their footprints show up in the snow, often overnight. Traces of their visits used to be seen in the area, but that's getting tougher to find as the snow piles up. Mostly they are hiding, trying to find a small corner of their world to keep relatively warm.

But let's face it: just about everyone in Western New York has become a member of the rabbit species in a sense.

We've had an odd set of circumstances here in the last couple of weeks. After a relatively calm stretch of weather for more than a month, the entire area went into the freezer. Yes, that can happen here. We've also received some snow in that time - a few inches here, several inches there, and so on. One key point is that Lake Erie has frozen over; it's the only Great Lake shallow enough to do that. So most of the snow has been widespread and not arriving in bands, like it did for the Southtowns when it received 79 inches in November.

The catch is that none of it has had the chance to melt. So, when the shovels, snowblowers and plows attack, they push and throw the snow ... somewhere. It piles up, and up, and up. Until it's difficult to find a free spot to put it. I believe I have shoveled for the last 14 straight days. I think that's a personal record. The snow pack has been above 20 inches for most of that time. If you are ready to say it's always like that in Buffalo, well, no, it hasn't been like this in at least 13 years. The statistics on this run of frozen weather keep changing, so it's difficult to keep up with them.

When this happens for several days, you have a mess - not an emergency mess for the most part, but a mess. Driving becomes an adventure filled with uncertainty. It starts with just getting out of the driveway, which comes with the knowledge that you might not even see an oncoming car because the view is blocked by snow. Once on the road, will there be space on a sidestreet for two cars coming in the same direction? Will the car get stuck somewhere? How long will a 20-minute drive take? That makes each car trip mentally tiring. I have been able to get around when necessary, but I'm not in a hurry to do so.

Adding to the trouble is the inevitable wind that blows some snow right back where the old snow was. Then there are the plows, which clear frozen material out of the street and deposit it on the side of the road, including the entrance to the driveway. By the way, street-cleared snow comes in boulder-sized chunks, so snowblowers are useless there. The stuff has to be cleared by shovel. I appreciate those plows ... after I'm done shoveling.

Driveways and sidewalks resemble bobsled runs. When pulling the car into the driveway, the best approach is to simply aim it up the middle and hope you don't skid too much. There's a chain link fence in my backyard. At least there is at the moment. Some of the drifts have just about reached the top of it, and we're probably a storm or two away from covering up most of it.

This weekend provided something of a cruel joke for the entire episode. On Friday morning, temperatures plunged to minus-5. Usually when we hit negative numbers here, it's because there is no cloud cover and the heat rises up and goes straight to Venus or something. Yet we had a little snow that day, dry and fluffy stuff that blows around easily. On Saturday, temperatures rose to 20 degrees as a front came through and deposited about four inches to mess things up a bit more. It made for an interesting drive to lacrosse practice.

And today, the forecast is for the coldest day in Buffalo history. I'm not sure how that's figured, since we aren't going to come too close to the record of minus-20. But we're scheduled to be below zero for virtually all day, hitting bottom at minus-12 early Monday morning. When exactly did I move to Winnipeg? It will warm up after that, sort of, but some single digits are still looming in the days ahead.

One of the odd parts about all this is that the cold spell dominates conversation as well as the news, but it's rarely been "don't even think about going outside" bad. (Admittedly, today is not the day for a leisurely walk through the park, with below-temperatures and a strong wind combining for a dangerous windchill.) Generally, it's just been tiring and inconvenient.

Yet life goes on. While driving on Saturday morning through the snow burst, one of the downtown streets was closed to traffic. Was there an accident? A snow drift? No, it was a 5-kilometer road race. I'm not sure how many people took part in the event, or in the 10-mile run in Lockport, but I salute all those that did.

I'm certainly not willing to trade this sort of weather for Boston's, which is working on its second blizzard of 2015 and has already broken the record for snow in February. And it's only the 15th. When I consider that city's street grid, laid out in the 1700s, I can't imagine what life is like there.

So, we trudge on. We pack an overnight bag when traveling, just in case. We wait for a 35-degree day after which we'll be able to see pavement again.

And we stay under cover and munch on lettuce. Because we're rabbits, for the time being.

(Late update: The high on Sunday apparently was plus-2, set at 12:20 a.m. The number sung into negative numbers pretty quickly and stayed there for the rest of the day. So we didn't set the record for the lowest high temperture in Buffalo's recorded history of about 150 years - merely for the lowest high figure on Feb. 15. So that's certainly a sign that things aren't THAT bad.)

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