My son is in a Boston suburb buried under 2 feet. Worse, he is director of traffic of a (different) Boston suburb, which means the snow clearance is his responsibility. He will be sleeping in his office.
When I saw the videos of the Atlantic Ocean rollers pounding houses in Scituate MA. That’s some crazy shit. Even crazier the houses were not washing away.
I’m in the Boston area. I didn’t go out at all on Saturday. I looked out the windows and I could still see the top of my car, and there was barely any snow on the back porch, so I thought the snowstorm was kind of a bust. When I went out to shovel on Sunday, there was a lot more than I expected; the wind had just blown it away from where I could see and it was ~2 feet deep in other places. My landlord had already cleared most of the driveway, and I just had to shovel out my car and around the trash cans. Took about an hour.
Between the 3 adults in my household, we took … 7 or 8 shifts of maybe 30-75 minutes each to shovel the driveway, the front walk, the snowbank from the town snowplow (counted separately because that was as much work as a driveway shift) and the area around the fire hydrant that we keep clear. I’d guess a little less than 2 feet of light, fluffy snow.
Just north of Boston, we got about 2 feet of fairly light snow. We were away for the weekend but hired a neighbor kid to shovel our driveway and sidewalk, so it was nice to be able to pull in the driveway right away. We had to shovel out the other car, yesterday, but it really wasn’t that bad. Not a lot of places to put the snow now, but the driveway and sidewalk are completely clear.
We were skiing in VT during the storm, and they got no snow. 
Can’t find it again, but saw a clip where a reporter was outside in the blizzard interviewing a couple of guys about Brady possibly retiring.
It ended with them saying they were out looking for an open Dunkin’.
I don’t know how much snow we got. The news says 7" but it took me 3 hours to shovel the driveway Sunday, so I think it was significantly more.
Do people not typically hire snow plows in the northeast? Around here (Ohio) almost every landscaper has a plow on their truck and does plowing all winter. Some people shovel and even more people have snow blowers, but for the most part you hire a plow.
Is it because we’ve typically got longer driveways? In my suburb most driveways are about 80 ft.
Many do, but shoveling a driveway is still more common. Most folks don’t have huge driveways, and it builds character. My driveway is about 40’. We also have to shovel the sidewalk.
Our private lane has three homes on it. It’s ~.25 miles. We just deal with snow by driving/compacting it. If we are supposed to get significant snow, I’ll drive up and down the lane every hour or so if we’re at home.
When we got hammered a few weeks back, I plowed with my gf’s Arctic Cat, but I don’t want to get in the habit of plowing.
Old people and rich people hire snow plows. Everyone else clears their own driveway.
Yeah, it’s possible your driveways are longer. Mine is about 20’ wide by 40’-50’ long.
But also, most of the people who shovel their driveways also mow their own lawns. I’d guess that if you regularly hire a landscaper, it’s easier to just keep hiring them over the winter than it is if you don’t already have a relationship with one.
Nah, not around here at least. Everyone mows their own lawn but we still find a way to get someone to plow our drives. It just happens that the people who own trucks with plows are the people who do landscaping in the summer. With Facebook and Nextdoor and word-of-mouth it’s easy to get the number of someone who can do a one-time-plow for you when needed.
We were forecast to get a foot of snow overnight and today. It was so extreme that the superintendent, yesterday at 3 PM, preemptively called off school both for today and tomorrow.
Wake up this morning, and there’s about an inch on the ground, with off-and-on light snow falling.
It just might have been justified for today, anyway, because there are probably some ice patches below that inch of snow, on any unsalted streets. But there’s no way this is still going to be a problem tomorrow morning.