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Winter's Revenge

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Saturday, March 26th, 2011 12:17 pm
The world here had begun to warm up and start looking like spring, but a few days ago Winter decided that it wouldn't go away without throwing one last, nasty punch. So we got a layer of ice, then a layer of wet, heavy snow, then another layer of ice, and finally another layer of wet, heavy snow. That made clearing the sidewalks and driveway a real pain: doing any shoveling by hand was hard because of the solid ice layer in the middle (and on the bottom), and even our pretty spiffy snowblower usually needed two passes or more to clear the ground. (It would often start by just plowing on top of the middle ice layer.)

But the worst victims were the plants. The initial coating of ice was a perfect surface for heavy snow to accumulate on, and the second ice layer just served to lock the snow in place. The weight proved to be too much for an old tree in our front yard. Toward the end of the storm, it ended up splitting down the middle. A big segment fell across the sidewalk, and the rest fell to the side, crushing the fence and the neighbor's bushes. Here's a picture taken after I'd already gotten the sidewalk clear:

For comparison, here's what the tree looked like (from another angle) when we bought the house: ( I'll tuck the other pictures away off of your Friends pages... )
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The Joy of Snow

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Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 11:25 pm
Like about half the country, I had a snow day today (which is apparently something like a once-a-decade event at Alma College). The tradeoff, of course, was that I had to get rid of a foot or more of snow along all my sidewalks and the driveway.

But it turns out, it was a joy! There was no rush, and last fall Kim and I splurged on a two-stage snow thrower, which with a little coaxing was able to handle the snow quite well. (The biggest challenge was hacking away the high walls of compressed snow that the city plows left behind, blocking our driveways and sidewalks from the street. But I was eventually able to grind through those after several passes.) In fact, inspired by a neighbor who often cleared part of our sidewalk for us with his snow thrower last year, I went ahead and cleared the sidewalk all the way down our block. (One tiny way to give back a little to the neighborhood.) I felt wonderfully altruistic... and it was cool to see the deep cut that I created through the drifts.

The other real delight of the day was watching our neighbors' young daughters romp through their yard in the morning. They were absolutely thrilled by the snow (some drifts and piles were as tall as they were!), and it took me back to glorious times like that when I was a kid. It's going to be a lot of fun to share that with my own kid(s) someday. Life is beautiful.
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