Snow in Tyrone? On New Year’s Day? Right on both counts. The temperature was certainly cold enough but it was not the skies overhead that filled Tim Braunlin’s front yard. Former New Yorkers with a penchant for turning nostalgia into reality, both the family and a number of wide-eyed neighbors benefitted from 14 year-old Gabe’s idea of constructing a snow machine. The idea worked.

The operations manager for Tyrone-based Operation Mobilization, Braunlin and his family moved to Tyrone in May 2008. The family’s memories of a snowy winter were given new life by Gabe, who hit upon the idea last year of making a snow machine.

“We have a friend who had a commercial machine. Gabe saw it and tried making one last year. This year we found the right kind of nozzle,” Tim said, standing in his front yard near midnight on New Year’s Day. “Gabe has been relentless with this.”

The construction project was akin to putting a ship in a bottle, Tim explained. Ideas from a snow-making website plus the trial and error of finding exactly what would work resulted in an impressive machine with three spray nozzles for water and one for the air needed to help distribute the frozen concoction onto the lawn and shrubbery, and sometimes onto the roof of the house on Logos Way.

Tim noted that the conditions of temperature and humidity have to be right to produce the snow, adding that it is nighttime hours that best facilitate making the frozen white powder.

Well, the proof is in the pudding. And in this case the pudding, make that the snow piling up in the front yard on that cold night, was certainly the proof. Tim watched from the sidelines as Gabe, his 21 year-old sister Erika and 17 year-old brother Zack threw snowballs while trying to avoid knocking over the snowman they made the night before.

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