Thursday, January 24th, 2019 – +7˚C / +44˚F – dark and raining at 11:59 pm –
– Another nasty ridge of snow at the end of our driveway this morning – This was taken at 11:07 am – The ice chopper is four feet, six inches from the bottom of the blade to the top of the handle- The Van’s roof is over six feet high, not counting the snow and ice above it. –
— There’s a woman in the U.S.A. who makes her opinions known and backs them up with good research. She has been warning people that RFID gives off radiation that has proven to be harmful to young growing human beings and she was livid when the folks at Disney Land and Disney world were making kids wear RFID embedded ‘proof of purchase’ gadgets on lanyards around their necks, blasting their harmful radiation into growing young men’s and women’s hearts and breasts. * She also told us several times that more civilians were killed by their own governments in the last century than by foreign hostile armies, and that included World Wars One and Two and a lot of more regional wars, ‘police actions’ et cetera. – Yes, in the name of greed and saving money, how many local municipal governments are dumping these ridges across driveways – and especially when Senior Citizens are involved – people on fixed incomes who can’t afford to pay anybody to plow, dig or snow blow for them, or can’t afford the yearly planned obsolescence cost of fixing and replacing parts designed to break when the warranty expires on equipment they bought and paid for less than five years ago? This is bull chips – this looks way too much like attempted murder. I’m serious. All levels of government have been lying their heartless tails off demanding much more tax money than then need and supplying less and less in the way of services, and if Walter Burien is right – { CAFR1.com } { That’s a number 1 after the R } – They’re all cooking their books and hiding the actual income streams they all have coming in and they could all stop charging taxes altogether and provide more and better services to everyone. – Hold them accountable, dangit!
– 11:08 am – You can probably see the ice building up on the side of the van as freezing rain began as mist around 10 minutes after 11 am and turned to actual rain drops by about quarter to twelve. –
— From this side you can see how much of the 4 feet, six inch ice chopper sticks up above the mountain our friendly neighbourhood snow plows left us. –
– Earlier this week, you could see the neighbour’s car above the snow bank. Now you can just barely see a bit of that same car’s roof back behind the snow bank that would totally hide it if it was in same place it was last Monday –
— Sigh, Shoveling through the ice-encrusted snow was not easy, I used a lighter snow shovel and didn’t try to do the whole danged driveway as quickly as I remember a third class “Petty” Officer demanded several of us to shovel snow in early 1970. Screaming ‘Officers’ like that left a deep impression on me. I still want to scream, “If you want it done your way do it yourself, you ice-hole!” – Of course I kept my mouth shut back then, insubordination might be a phony crime in retrospect, but it was punishable in those days.
– 11:57 am – I had cut a two and a half foot wide path through the ridge –
— Okay, the four and a half foot ice chopper on the left has been joined by a four foot, three inches long shovel { including the handle } in the middle and a three foot, nine inch chopper on the right. The rain mist had already turned to real rain drops by this point, and I was feeling dizzy every time I reached down to pick up a shovel full of snow and ice – I had to quit shortly after I took this photo.
– Cathi took this photo of our street with its thick coat of ice at about 6 pm this evening. –
— I came inside around noon after shoveling one two and a half foot wide canyon through the mountain at the end of our driveway. I thought I would rest for a bit and then go back and do some more, if not finish the whole driveway – As it turned out, I began to feel sick, and plopped down and woke up after six p.m. and when I got up – Cathi had already finished shoveling – took her about two and a half hours to finish what I’d started, and she had to deal with heavy wet snow and ice – As you can probably guess, our road is looking pretty treacherous out there now.
— And we expect to get a lot more rain over night, and expect a hard freeze before morning. Every public French and English speaking school in New Brunswick was closed on Thursday, and it looks like they’ll all be closed again on Friday.
— I should probably say something like, “I’ll never complain about a winter without snow again-” but I’d be lying. I’d rather have snow and a lot of it than have to deal with biting bugs and the threat of alligators in swimming pools year round – 😉 –
— Sigh — Have a good life…. { Schnarr schnarr scharr shnarr schnarr – } —
~~~~~ Namasté anyway —
~~~~~ Jim
