Blizzard and Online Rockhounding Adventure Update

I must admit that I didn't try to leave the house yesterday.  The blizzard has now been pounding the Lake Superior shoreline for 36 hours and is not expected to lessen until around 5:00 tonight.  It felt yesterday like my house was being buried one inch at a time.  The kitchen window on the south side of my house starts around seven feet off the ground.  When I woke yesterday the drift was around six inches above the bottom of the window.  By last night the drift was most of the way up the window.  This morning the wind gusts are still near 50 mph, causing the chill factor to be well below zero.  The ambient temperature is around nine.  It is still dark outside early this morning, but it looks like there are snow drifts everywhere outside.

Here are a few photos I took yesterday. You can see from the pictures below that the drift against the windows of my sun porch are around four feet tall, but there is a drift next to the window that is around seven feet tall.

 

 

Here are a couple of pictures looking west out of my sun porch.  The drift is almost ten feet tall.

 

 

 

Even in front of my house to the north where the wind blows most of the snow away, the snow is three feet deep.

 

 

 

 

ONLINE ROCKHOUNDING ADVENTURE PROJECT UPDATE

Now for the good news:  my webmaster started working on the project yesterday.  He set things up on his end and I started transferring the project files.  The software instructions are not at all clear about how to "publish" to a website.  There are more than a dozen format choices, but I think we finally figured out which format to use on the third try, after seeking technical help from the software developer.  So far I have only tried to transfer the files for the shortest segment.  It still remains to be seen if the rest of the segment files are too large to transfer, and whether the movies will all play back properly.  If worse comes to worse, I may have to drive and meet with my webmaster in person.  Given the road conditions in the upper peninsula, I hope that we will not have to resort to that option.  Even though we are using FTP to transfer files, it will take a few days to transfer all the files.  Then we'll test the segments to make sure everything works.