ME vs. THE SNOW after THE STORM

Or "OH HEY, LOOK A BONUS POST IN THE HOPES YOU FORGET OR FORGIVE MY SLIP UP YESTERDAY!"

Since I skipped yesterday you get a BONUS POST today, which is really just me trying to spend 45 minutes before I have to leave for a thing. Because the thing I did between my last post and this one was mildly adventurous and not without mildly interesting details.

The hardest part about shoveling today was getting out of the house. 

Yep. I could not get out of most of the doorways. The wind had done a fascinating job sculpting the snow into high drifts with intermittent, almost-bare patches. It left sizable piles in front of the two most-used doors, which includes the front door and the basement door (that leads directly to the driveway). 

The screen / storm doors on those both open out, as these things usually do. Between the piles of snow and thick icy crust on top of them, I could not get the leverage to force them open enough for me to get out. I probably could have done it, but I did want to conserve energy for the primary shoveling challenges.

Luckily this is a wonderfully oddball house, and it left me with various side doors and porch doors to try. And really, out of the remaining four, three of them were quite openable. I just had to pick one, after considering the best route around the house and down to the driveway. Which had the least or lowest drifts to traverse?

The best route was out the back porch, and most of the walk beyond that wasn't too bad. But once I got to the front of the house, I had to get to the road to avoid going through ALL the largest drifts.

I made it to the road without losing a boot! I feel this needs some celebration. Just a few feet from the road, one foot sank solidly past my knee into the snow, which triggered a flashback. Not some uncontrollable flip-out due to past trauma mind you, just a very important memory that came to mind. Something very similar happened to me when I was ±7 or 8, playing in the snow after a blizzard. In that case, when I went to pull my foot out, both my boot AND my sock came off, stuck solidly in the snow. 

I was not happy about it. Maybe a little traumatized. Hey, I was 7. Or 8.

Either way, his time, with a little fiddling, I made a much more successful extraction. Yay, experience!

From there it was just a super short, hard-to-even-call-it-a-walk walk down the road and into the mostly plowed driveway.

There’s not much to say about the rest. 

There’s nothing terribly clever about first digging a path into the car so I could start it and its own heat & defoggers could soften things up for me while I dug out the front tires.

There’s nothing terribly clever about my pre-shoveling “ice-chopper” technique that broke up the crunchy top layer before I went into shoveling mode.

There’s nothing terribly clever about shoveling small amounts to make sure I didn’t kill my back.

Or maybe there is. I dunno. My back is pretty happy about it, and I got some solid writing done afterwards. 

Win-win-win.
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