We had a sleetstorm last night. For those not familiar with the vagaries of northern precipitation, sleet is little frozen balls of ice, usually the size of mustard seeds or smaller, and sometimes with a bit of freezing rain mixed in. Sleet is distinct from snow, hail, freezing rain, and all the other forms of frozen precipitation.

Sleet happens when there's freezing rain aloft, which freezes almost completely before reaching the ground. If the ground temperature is just a few degrees warmer, you'd get freezing rain. Freezing rain falls as liquid, but freezes as soon as it hits something, and is far worse than sleet. This is one of those few times you're thankful for the cold.

The storm last night left about an inch of sleet over everything. In practical terms, this is like getting a couple inches of snow: a nuisance, but not a big deal. Imagine someone dumping a giant Icee all over the ground.

When it comes to shoveling, though, an inch of sleet is about the worst case scenario. There's just enough of it to make one feel obligated to clean it up, but it all froze to the ground overnight. The blade of the snowshovel simply slides across the icy crust, rather than doing anything productive. Some (but not all) snowblowers will do a good job on this mess, but I'm a bit old-fashioned and like to move snow by hand.

The only way to shovel an inch of frozen sleet is to laboriously scrape the stuff up from the pavement. It didn't take long to discover that this process would take hours for our small driveway.

So I did the only rational thing under the circumstances. I scraped off the front steps, then went inside to check the weather forecast for a warming trend.