Lisa has found it rather challenging to buy a non-Chinese-made thermometer that is Celsius-only. Thus when she found one in Helsinki, she bought it. Now it's on a post outside our back door in a semi-sheltered area where we think it will not get direct sunlight, and thus we hope will give true air temperature. Here you can see that the temps had just reached freezing, and accordingly the snow visible in the background had started to stick.
Early rounds of the snow had been light and fluffy — the stuff Lisa calls "TV commercial" weather because it's the powdery snow through which you drive 4WD vehicles when you want to show them off in a commercial. This was thus light enough that she could break out the leaf blower.
We try to keep the porch and sidewalks clear of snow when we can do so. The more often you clear snow, the less you have to do each time you do it. In this case Lisa used the leaf blower mainly to see how well it worked, which was pretty well under these conditions. Later in the day the snow got wetter and gloppier, so it was back to the heavy broom and shovel to move it.
Total accumulation could not have been much more than 2 cm, and we got lots of exercise sweeping snow as it fell throughout the day.
By the time most of the snow had stopped, we had things fairly clear.
Around sundown, we decided to risk a walk around downtown. I slipped twice and Lisa four times, but fortunately none of us took a total spill. While the snow was gone, as the sun went down it got cold quite fast, and all of the water and snow on the sidewalks turned to ice rather quickly. We were fortunate to get back home without falling.
