Chipping away
Feb. 18th, 2007 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThe past week has been exhausting--on top of work, commuting and the baby, there's dealing with all the snow that was dumped on us on Valentine's Day. This was deceptive in that it was far from the deepest snow we've gotten in the area, maybe 10 inches in Haverhill at the outside. But it was icy, sleety stuff that quickly transformed into a rocklike mass, and the snowstorm came at an inopportune time of day, snowing all day and well into the night so that it was impossible to get a head start on it while the sun shone. Then there was a series of incredibly cold, windy days that left everything frozen really hard and made it impossible to shovel after sunset.
I stupidly left my car parked on the street. I thought I was being a good citizen by at least following the alternate-side-of-street rule correctly, but nobody else did, so the snowplows had to swerve around. My car ended up almost completely buried in a mound of this icy stuff, pushed up around it and made even harder by the plows. I spent a couple of days just chipping away at this mound, which kept me from getting around to the rest of what I needed to clear.
To make matters worse, we were scheduled to get our new washer and dryer delivered on Valentine's Day. The delivery people rescheduled for the next day, but there was no conceivable way we could get a path to the basement bulkhead door cleared of snow and ice in time for them to come, and when they did show up, they couldn't or wouldn't manage it (I don't blame them). They're coming back on Tuesday and we've cleared out what I hope is an adequate path. I also spent today clearing out an approach to the mailbox, per the peeved flyer that the Postal Service left.
Sam's feeling guilty about our laggard treatment of all this, but I don't really see how we could have done any better; even a snowblower would be useless on this stuff. It's not that heavy, but removing it is an exhausting matter of chipping the compressed snow into portable blocks that leaves your arms sore for days. I could have put my car in the driveway beforehand, and I guess I could have stayed outside for the entire duration of the storm and shoveled the snow away continuously as it fell, but that's all I can figure.
I stupidly left my car parked on the street. I thought I was being a good citizen by at least following the alternate-side-of-street rule correctly, but nobody else did, so the snowplows had to swerve around. My car ended up almost completely buried in a mound of this icy stuff, pushed up around it and made even harder by the plows. I spent a couple of days just chipping away at this mound, which kept me from getting around to the rest of what I needed to clear.
To make matters worse, we were scheduled to get our new washer and dryer delivered on Valentine's Day. The delivery people rescheduled for the next day, but there was no conceivable way we could get a path to the basement bulkhead door cleared of snow and ice in time for them to come, and when they did show up, they couldn't or wouldn't manage it (I don't blame them). They're coming back on Tuesday and we've cleared out what I hope is an adequate path. I also spent today clearing out an approach to the mailbox, per the peeved flyer that the Postal Service left.
Sam's feeling guilty about our laggard treatment of all this, but I don't really see how we could have done any better; even a snowblower would be useless on this stuff. It's not that heavy, but removing it is an exhausting matter of chipping the compressed snow into portable blocks that leaves your arms sore for days. I could have put my car in the driveway beforehand, and I guess I could have stayed outside for the entire duration of the storm and shoveled the snow away continuously as it fell, but that's all I can figure.