Ice, Snow, Crap

When we bought the house, the previous owner told me the driveway was 400' long. The year we bought the house, there were two storms that dropped around a foot of snow each time.

Doing some rough math that's, 400(length) x 10(average width) x 1(snow depth) = 4,000 cubic feet of snow to remove.

Ouch.

Luckily the house came with a big lawn tractor and a plow, and wheel weights, and tire chains. Just remove the mower deck, install all the "winter accessories", and slam away. Plowing is basically slamming snow off the driveway. Back up and repeat. Fun the first few times. Extremely tedious after three hours of it.

It only snowed worthy of the plow that first year. Ever since we've gotten just dustings - which we ignore, ice - which we ignore, or the worst snow then ice - which we can't ignore.

Since the ice and snow combos only happen once maybe twice a year, it's hardly worth it to go through the lawn tractor "winter accessory" trouble.

So what to do?

Only shovel part of it. Start from the garage and shovel a single clean path for one side of the car to track to the road.

Sounds simple enough, but a 2' wide path 400' long of 2" of snow and a .5" of ice on top is anything but simple.

At the tree there's a bend. You can see where I made an attempt to clear the entire width. That attempt was of course abandoned. The bamboo obviously came down too.

I did park the Mazda out of the way in case plowing was necessary. If we had gotten any more of either (ice or snow), plowing would have been necessary.

To the bamboo is somewhere between half way and two-thirds. There's still a lot to go.

Shoveling the single lane from garage to road took an hour. Going back and adding a second lane (for safety sake) took another hour.

By now it was 10am. Time to shower and get to work.

Needless to say, I was pretty wasted yesterday, though snowboarding and driving till midnight (in the snow) the night before had nothing to do with that. :-)

- b