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

[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.