Freezing Rain, fallen snow and brilliant sun

Saturday night (which incidentally coincided with a friend's hilarious 80's style party) turned out to be our first experience of freezing rain. Well that's a funny way of describing hail isn't it? or so we thought, but unlike simple hail, this climatic horror rains down on the world and freezes on impact turning everything to ice. So Sunday morning, foggy with hangovers and little sleep we awoke to a very frozen world which had also been dumped on by nearly a foot of snow. After losing Eddie in a drift we figured it was about time to dust off those snow shoes and accept that it's February and therefore the snow is here to stay. Despite blazing sun and bright blue skies, the temperatures of -18 with a -27 windchill are not very conducive to melting the piles of snow that surround us. However, the sunshine today has felt almost tropical and I am convinced that my hair got a few shades blonder as I sat sipping my very chilled rose on the deck in a toast to St Valentine. We are still without a safe or legal working car to take on the  roads, though I am sure that many of our community are permanently in the same boat and don't seem to think of it as a problem. The snow bank across the barn door and sheet ice covering the yard prevent us from taking out the mystery machine, even if we were mad enough so fingers crossed we can purchase our new van soon. Our last experience with dodgy dealers in Moncton was all too tiresome and has made us rather wary. At least all this house-sitting has meant that this year's planning and seed ordering is pretty much done and dusted, thank goodness, we are both rather sick of guesstimating numbers of blooms from flowers and attempting to answer the never-ending question; "how many seeds of this one shall we get?".