Snow...snow....and more snow. I live in Texas, btw, not Illinois, where I got away from as soon as I could because I HATE SNOW. We got dumped on last week. Monday night it came in with a vengeance and covered us with a mix of ice and snow. My driveway was impossible to get out of and just when I thought we would be ok, we got more snow on Thursday. I was stuck in my house until Saturday morning.
This was the view out my front door when I woke up Tuesday morning. I love how it's so compacted it doesn't even come inside when I open the door! It just kept on coming...
Here's my back porch. Unfortunately, I have a sliding glass door, so I was not lucky with the snow staying outside this time.
And then of course my back yard. The dogs were less than pleased.
I know a lot of Northerners laugh at us when we freak out because of snow but here's a couple things you should understand. 1) of course, we just don't get it that often so 2) we don't have the infrastructure to take of it, meaning we don't have salt trucks (we have about 2 sand trucks for whole state) and we certainly don't have any snow plows (very few of us even have snow shovels, I know I don't) so it sits there till it warms up enough to melt and then 3) we don't normally just get snow, we get ICE STORMS. Our ice storms are brutal and driving on ice is impossible.
Last Tuesday I'm sitting at home (because the entire state has shut down and I didn't have to work) and hear this commotion outside. My neighbor is trying to get his truck down the street. He's gunning his engine for all it's worth. The truck goes about an inch and then slides back two. I watch fascinated for a few minutes before I decide to be nice and see if there's anything I can do to help the guy get back home. After trying paper bags under the wheels (those just shot out the other side like they were coming out of a cannon) and cardboard boxes (not much better) another neighbor comes out. He pushes on the back end while I hop in the bed to give the truck a little more weight. I'm not a skinny girl but I'm not very big either. I was not enough weight. I finally ask the guy where he was trying to go, because it was obvious he wasn't giving up and going home. "I just needed to get a couple things from the Dollar General." In disgust I turned around and went home. The Dollar General is two blocks away. He could have walked there and back in all the time it took to mess with the damn ice. Just before I left he says, "I've never had so much trouble driving on snow before. I drive on snow all the time." He has Tennessee plates. If I didn't already think the guy was a moron, I would have pointed out that this was not snow, but ice. I just didn't think it would matter at that point.
So what does this have to do with my theme of Living Compassionately? I tried to be compassionate. I swear I did. I went out and spent a good 30 minutes in below 0 weather trying to help this guy out, trying to convince him to go home. There's only so much you can do when people are stupid.
Friday I was finally so sick of being stuck in the house that I went out with my garden rake (remember...no shovel) and raked the snow off the drive, then I had to break all the ice and scrape it off the drive. Here's the before:
Unfortunately I did not get my rear in gear and start working on this mess until about 4 in the afternoon. So by the time I got to the end of the drive, the top had re-frozen. lol Saturday morning it finally got above freezing and EVERYONE'S driveways were passable. Oh well, mine was best though because I had a head start.
Side note, we got more snow today. I am really, really not happy with this year's winter.
0 comments:
Post a Comment