Shovels

We're pretty much all thawed out now.  I got out yesterday about 4:00 or so to check on the roads.  Once I got out of the neighborhood, the streets were mostly ok but there were patches.  We thought the plows had gotten to us by that time, which they had.  Sometimes they don't get this far out, sometimes they do.  I don't know if they have any rhyme or reason to their schedule, once they get the specific areas such as hospitals, police department, etc. done.

Anyway, I went to Wallyworld and their parking lot had been plowed.  The plow was still there, it was running and the driver was standing inside the store doors.  It looked like he was trying to get warm.  There was a huge amount of water on their parking lot after the plowing.  I was able to get a 25# bag of birdseed.

This morning, I waited until the traffic had time to get over with before I left for work.  I did have a few spots where it was icy.  At one point, I was behind a plow/sand truck.  He was getting spots that had been missed the day before and I could tell when he put his plow down because he was sparky!  Once I got to the street I work on, it's a residential street since we're in a duplex, it was obvious that it hadn't been touched at all.  Because most of the houses/duplexes on that street are actually businesses, it doesn't generally get the traffic that most other non-residential streets get on bad weather days.  It was a slip and slide all the way to the driveway.  The driveway was snow covered, but I made at attempt to get up it so I could get into the uphill driveway.  Actually, I made two or three attempts.  Then I gave up and parked in the street!  I was only about 2 feet short of being able to get to the garage, but it just wasn't happening.  With the street being essentially a solid sheet of ice, it was an adventure walking across it!  Once the sun came out, the driveway started thawing out.  All except for the last few feet which were shaded.  I spread a little ice melt out on it and went inside.  After a while, I checked it and the ice melt had worked somewhat.  I got out the snow shovel and got a little ice/snow off in the tire track areas and put more ice melt out.  I did that a couple of times and it's really hard to operate a snow shovel when you have tendinitis in your left elbow!!!  The rest of the driveway was melted off and starting to dry out pretty good when I left at 3:30.  The street was mostly thawed and a lot of it was dried as well.

We were supposed to get a fast moving rain storm with high winds this evening.  We could see the clouds.  Some of the early reports were actually that it was huge, wet snowflakes instead of rain.  We got nothing out of it, so I'm not complaining.  It will be very cold tonight, we should be getting a very hard freeze tonight.  But it should be ok as far as driving in the morning.

I fed the birds this morning, and they were waiting on me!  Feathered pigs.  I put out two feeders and tossed out quite a bit of seed on the ground.  There were kitty paw prints on the front porch when I left.  I saw several squirrels today.  I hope that all the animals mean that winter's done!

But I'm not in a hurry for SpringStorms.  Not at all.