Another Two Feet of Snow!  Are You Kidding me?!

      I haven't been able to post much these past two weeks, because I have been spending most of my time shoveling snow.  Because of the white crap, I missed two days of work this week.  On Monday, due to the accompanying high winds I had some drifts that were knee deep and right across my driveway.  On the 12th, driving in to work took twice as along as normal, and then when I got there I had a service call over 100 miles away.  That made for a long day.  
       Being late season snows, they are heavy and wet - the kind that sticks to the shovel when you try to throw it.  Then this past Friday the weatherman forecasted another few inches.  Well, he was wrong again.  It turned out to be over two feet, with some drifting that was deeper.  
      I was starting to think that this was totally contradicting my earlier post about regular, cyclical global temperature changes.  I stated that it is indeed getting warmer, but this much snow in later April makes it look like we're entering an ice age.  If it keeps snowing like this a massive glacier will form over my house.  It will eventually crush me and my house and in a thousand years deposit our pulverized remains out onto the Great Plains.  Weather like this has Minnesotans ask in pain, "Where is this global warming they promised?  Curses to you Al Gore.  Your Chicken Little sqawking got our hopes up for nothing!" 

                                           My car in the driveway on Friday 

                                                                 Another view

      Yes, we here in Minnesota have been looking forward to global warming for as long as the theory first came out.  Lake Superior could become an exotic resort area, like the French Riviera.  Being inhabited though, of mostly conservative, Scandinavian stock, our beaches would most likely never be clothing optional.  Although they might say they would like it, the average Norwegian-, Finnish-, or Polish-American would be a bit freaked out by it. 
      We up this far north would also welcome being able to grow a greater variety of things in our gardens.  Right now what grows best for us are root vegetables (carrots, turnips, potatoes, and rutabagas), green beans, peas, cabbage, broccoli, pumpkins and squash.  Our presently short (but we are hoping) growing season makes it difficult to get a good batch of sweet corn, and tomatoes are just a fight against nature. 
      Up here we can't get corn or beans to mature fully into seed, so they have to all be harvested in their "green" state.  Most grain doesn't make it to maturity either.  Then IF you get a decent crop of something in your garden - IF - the white tail deer find out and telepathically tell the whole herd for a couple mile radius that you have goodies, and they descend upon your poor, climatically fragile garden. 
      You could sit there and guard your harvest, or leave your dog outside to guard it for you, but the deer know something.  They know you and your dog will eventually have to sleep - sometime.  And they are patient.  They will wait.  I'll put in a fence, you say.  How high do you want to make it?  These deer can easily jump fourteen feet - and they have fun doing it.  They have even more fun just wrecking your fence, and watching try to mend it afterward.  When you survey the damage they have done to both your fence and your winter's food supply, and they see your anguish, as you scream, or maybe even cry, they sit out in the woods and snicker.  I know.  I've heard them.  There's not much that is more sickening than the sarcastic snicker of a White Tail deer.
      At least they won't touch your cucumbers or squash - they won't even go through a patch of it.  You can protect the things they see as "prizes" by surrounding it with a patch of the prickly vines.  It's all a part of the fight. 
      That's why I gave up on gardens several years ago.  Why work my butt off to feed them when there is plenty of things out in the woods to just go out and harvest.  The battling to grow this stuff is out of your hands.  Just go pick it.  We have various berries, hazel nuts, and manoomin (wild rice).  And the deer don't or can't eat these things.
      I always imagine that the people living around Lake Baikal, or in Omga, or Ojmjakon would feel the same way about global warming.  They probably look forward to it like we do here in northern Minnesota. 
      Fighting the deer for a head of cabbage or a rutabaga just isn't worth it.  If things warm up around here though, and I can grow something besides the standard fare, then the fight might be worth it.