I can dig that

[xela]

My ankle isn't very happy with me, but aside from that I had fun digging out from last night's snow.

I was vaguely hoping today's rain would solve the problem for me, so I didn't actually go outside til fairly late this afternoon. By then the snow had absorbed enough rain for shoveling it to be real work. Once I'd dug my way out to the sidewalk, here's what the view toward the driveway looked like. The car belongs to a neighbor, who rents an offstreet space from us. Since Chris is in California and I've gone car free, theirs is the only car using the driveway this winter. I'm just as happy not to be having to dig out a car, on top of clearing the sidewalk. (And yes, by the way, tearing out the chainlink fence is part of Chris's remodeling plans. That hideous thing is one of the reasons I haven't posted many pictures of the house.)

Here's the view from behind their car after I was done: The shovel, standing in the otherwise undisturbed snow in the driveway, has a blade 14.5 inches long. I'm pretty sure it was less than half that deep after Thursday's snowfall, so it must have really been coming down last night. (Yes, I did dig to the corner, including a clear path into the crosswalk (more on that below). But I seem to have put in an S-curve, so you can't see all the way.)

One of the joys of living on a corner lot is getting to clear the sidewalk on two sides. We had of course cleared the sidewalks Friday, so I only had last night's snowfall to dig out. In front of the house, this was about eight or ten inches, and for the most part I was able to dig it straight off the concrete, clearing about eight inches sidewalk for each shovelful. But for some reason on the North side of the house, it was at least a foot deep — and that was before people digging out their cars piled more on. I'm pretty sure I moved more snow on this side of the house than in front, even though the sidewalk is only about two-thirds as long.

Carving a roughly foot-deep trough in all this wet snow resulted in a lot of water pouring out. None of the pictures turned out (photographing running water is hard enough with natural light; turns out to be nigh impossible with flash), but I put a fair amount of effort into clearing a path in the slush on the street (the city appears not to have ploughed the side street since the snow stopped falling, so it's a slushy mess), so the water would have somewhere to drain. "Tomorrow is forecast to be Much Cooler than today", according to wunderground.com, and I really don't expect my drainage effort to have worked. I imagine the corner will be a skating rink by morning

Comments

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Much as it is frustrating and (literally) a pain to get an injury, I'm guessing that you're a hell of a lot stronger and fitter than you were this time last year.
You tend not to notice your own raised fitness levels, but looking at all this excavation work I'm boggling - there's a lot of work here.
Wow.

(That and this sort of crazy snow is not something we get in Blighty.)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Oh, trust me, I'm aware of the change in my own fitness level. The change has been way too rapid not to notice. I tend to play it down, largely because I don't want to get so busy patting myself on the back for how far I've come that I lose track of how far I have to go.

But I reckon a little self-congratulation won't kill me. So let's see: According to the experts at the Government of Canada, fresh snow weighs around 100 kg per cubic meter, and packed snow weighs between 200 and 300. The sopping wet snow yesterday seemed to me to be heaver than any snowpack I've ever seen, but let's be conservative and say it was in the middle of that range, 250 kg/m³. I dug out a tad over 50 meters of sidewalk, clearing a path the width of my snow shovel, which, conveniently, is just about exactly half a meter; the average snow depth was conservatively 25 cm. 50 x 0.5 x 0.25 = 6.25. Round it down to six; 6 x 250 = 1500. So I shifted at least a ton and a half of snow yesterday in around 40 minutes.

[alierak.livejournal.com]

I think you need to say "tonne" to avoid implying imperial units. But yeah, pretty impressive.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Matric, Imperial, or short --- I don't care. I moved a better than ton and a half of snow by any of them in 49 minutes, with time out to take pictures. And I'm pretty damned pleased with myself about it.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

I'm suitably impressed by your efforts and also impressed by the beauty of the place you live in. We don't get snow like that here! Although when living in North Wales a few years back, one Xmas morning I had to dig my way to the goat shed before the animals could have their breakfast (and we ours; milk for the cornflakes). It was one of the rare pleasant Xmas experiences I've ever had. Anyway, will go now to read your homepage and see if you reveal where you are.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

You do!

You also have what appears to be a typo in your Interests list. Did you mean 'new urbanism'?

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Wow, I haven't even looked at my LJ profile in years. Reading it with fresh eyes, it comes off rather pompous. It's all true, but nobody reading it would guess that people who spend time around me tend to laugh a lot. I should work on that....

Thanks for catching the typo; fixed now.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I lived on a farm til I was eight and much as I love city life, I still miss it sometimes. (It's suburbs I can't stand, the worst of both worlds. Though come to think of it, I'm not sure you have anything like an American style suburb in the UK. Lucky you.)

Goat milk on cornflakes... I'll have to try that sometime. We always had at least one milk cow when I was little, and I can still remember the taste of milk warm from the cow. We also had a goat for a while, but all I remember is trying it once, when I was four or five and going through an I don't like that phase. I don't think I've tried goat milk since.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

We have suburbs and I like them very much. Either you and I have different tastes or our countries have different kinds of suburb (or both). What's wrong with your kind?

Goat milk does need to be handled with good hygeine, filtered and cooled immediately after milking. Without those precautions it can have a strong taste that most people (including me) dislike. But I used to be able to serve our goats' milk on cereal or in tea without people noticing.