"Rain," the forecasters all predicted for this past weekend. Rain from Friday through Sunday coinciding with my monthly trip to western Pennsylvania. Rain as often as I checked on Yahoo, The Weather Channel, and even the National Weather Service (whose forecasters speak with all the enthusiasm of their staid brethren on PBS).
Well, I rode through 24 miles of that "rain" on Interstate 80 yesterday afternoon, and if I hadn't given up biting my fingernails in the sixth grade when I got a piece of chewed nail stuck in my throat during geography class one afternoon, I'd have devoured every last one of them down to the quick between Lamar and Loganton. Apparently nobody told the rain that it was supposed to be in liquid form and I drove through what seemed to be every form of wintry precipitation that water can take. There was a car upside down in the divider. Another facing backward on the shoulder. A third with an obviously broken axle was down in the gulch beside the shoulder and apparently came to an abrupt stop when the front end rammed the foot of the mountain beside the road.
I ripped a trucker apart on Friday on the CB when he cut his rig right in front of me in the passing lane only to slow me way down to 65, and there I was on Sunday slugging along somewhere in the 20 and 30 MPH range for close to an hour with most of the other sensible motorists, all of us too thankful to be moving along at all. Eventually I hit the dividing line between the crap and the rain and rode the rest of the way back in relative ease.
About 8 PM the junk started falling here. When I was going to bed around 10:30 there was about an inch of slush / freezing rain / sleet on the sidewalk so I ran the shovel over the walkway in front of the house and cleared the cars figuring that the changeover to rain would wash away the little bit of solid junk that was still falling and all would be well in the morning. Instead I was rudely awakened at 5 AM with the announcement that five inches of snow had fallen overnight. School was delayed by two hours and when I got back in the house after clearing the cars and sidewalks completely it was cancelled.
I kept up with clearing the deck with every storm that besieged us this winter, but this time I'm throwing in the towel. After cleaning everything in front of the house, by the time I cleared a single shovel width of what was on the deck surface, I'd had enough. The warmer temperatures later in the week can take care of this. I'm not, and even the thought of running the scooter through the thaw won't make me.
1 comment:
We had about 10 inches just north of you and clearing it from my driveway was a death march. I have a small snow thrower and it works on powdery snow just fine. This snow was wet and heavy and the thrower stalled about twenty times. On the first pass clearing a path all I could do was ram into the snow ahead about two inches and back off and hit it again. Then I widened the path about six inches at a time until I cleared the driveway. It normally takes me thirty minutes, this took two hours. Thank heavens Spring is only 12 days away.
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