11:00 a.m. - Baseline

At 11:00 a.m. I went out and took baseline shots.  As you can see, we're not starting with no snowfall.  There's a bit on the ground, but nothing that would even make most Chicagoans blink.  Until you tell them that we're going to put two feet MORE on top of that. 

Homemade and highly unscientific snow gauge

So here's my snow gauge.  Made of two garden stakes duct taped together with a sign made on my computer and protected by a Ziploc bag.  Very scientific right?  Yeah. 

To be fair, I am aware that this is not how honest-to-meteorology gauges work.  They're designed to keep drifting from becoming a factor in measurements.  However, as the person who has to walk down the sidewalk where this is?  I'm way more worried about 'how high is the snow ON ME?' than I am with 'does this set a record?' measurements.  If you look carefully, I thought I was being outrageous marking up to 36 inches on this thing.  I just saw a weather model that had us getting 34.7 inches.  How utterly ridiculous would that be?

Starting with a two inch base

Okay, I disturbed the snow a tad when setting up, but I think it's safe to say, we have two inches of snow on the ground when we start.

Car - baseline

 Okay, here's a few other baseline shots.  Like I said, I had to move my car, so it got dusted off.  No snow on the car at 11:00.

Fireplug - baseline

There's a very low fireplug down the street from me.  It doesn't have a flag on it.  It's going to completely disappear, I'm guessing, before I go to bed.  The fence next to it is about 2 feet high.

Street - baseline

And here's the street.  Like in the above shots, you can see that we're starting with some snow.  What's going to be problematic is that the snow we have has already been packed down by traffic.  Now, this is a side street that won't get plowed until the major arteries are completely clear - which, I'm guessing, may be sometime Thursday or Friday (like, three days from now) and we may be getting a layer of ice in with the storm.  This road is going to be pretty scary for a little while.  I'm going to be taking the CTA for the next, oh, two weeks if I possibly can.



So here we are.  The 11:00 shot of the gauge.  I think I'm going to need to toss the iPod in a plastic bag or set it on something closer to the marker.  You can't really see that it says "11:00" in this shot.

11:00 a.m. Gauge

Snow is coming down, but in amounts that wouldn't even register to most people at this rate.  I hear that'll change in a few hours though. ;)

Just heard on the news that they're expecting 18 foot waves to come off Lake Michigan onto Lake Shore drive.  The insane part of me is thinking "I REALLY want to go see that!"  I'm honestly trying to figure out if there's a not-terminally-insane way of doing that on the CTA.  (Because there's no way I'm moving my car now!)