Winter woes

They say when it rains, it pours. This past week, when it snows, it seems to never stop! As I’m writing this, the forecast is for an additional thirteen inches of snow overnight. That’s on top of the approximately twenty-four inches from the last dump on top of the eighteen inches or so from the first big snowfall. Enough is enough!

My wife constantly reminds me that I said I don’t mind the snow. I have said that I don’t mind the snow as much as I don’t like extremely cold temperatures. Since I’m retired, I normally don’t have to go anywhere when it’s snowing, except maybe a doctor’s appointment or some such. Snow in reasonable amounts is pretty, I think, and makes the world seem “wintery.” But we are way beyond “reasonable” at this point!

This has been a tough week for us. I’ve mentioned the snow already. We’ve had two power failures, one lasting two-and-a-half hours and another for maybe five or ten minutes. The last one might have been a scheduled outage to finish repairs from the first outage, but if it was, I didn’t hear about it prior to the outage.

We were probably lucky the first time at only being down for a couple of hours. From what I heard, other folks were without power well into the next day. I learned a couple of things about our heaters because of the two outages. Our smaller, upstairs heater reset itself and came back on like nothing happened after the longer outage and did the same after the shorter break in service.

The larger, downstairs heater defaulted to a much lower initial setting after the longer outage and had to be manually reset to the preferred temperature setting. I didn’t find that out until a couple of hours after the power came back on. The short outage didn’t change anything. Apparently, a certain amount of time needs to pass where the heater has lost power for it to default to lower settings. I’ll try to remember that for future reference with power outages.

After my ankle joint replacement surgery, I’m walking reasonably well – something I was unable to do for the past couple of years. Since I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t use our snowblower to clear driveways and walking paths. We had to rely on a good friend with a BobCat or a commercial plower to open us up.

Anyway, I got the snowblower out of the storage building, gassed it up, checked the oil, primed the carburetor, and set the choke. To my great surprise, the engine fired up and ran on the first pull. I began clearing a path through the eighteen-inch first snowfall back to the house. I cleared an area around my truck in our driveway so I could get out if needed.

Since I’m an old guy who is out of shape, I decided to take a break before clearing around our SUV. I had already cleared a path from the front door out to my truck and along the SUV and a connector to the storage building path. When I came back out to continue snowblowing, the pull cord broke on my first pull! This would be a relatively simple fix if one was mechanically inclined, which I am not.

Now we needed to find somebody to plow our driveways. The first guy we called came over, looked at the layout and refused service since there was not much room to pile snow in our yard. He did, however, help me load the snowblower in the back of my truck and told me about a local small engine repair shop.

We called a second local guy who uses a large piece of heavy construction machinery to plow, and he had no problem clearing our driveways. We are now on his regular service list for plowing.

I was able to get the snowblower dropped off at the repair shop after taking two of our little dogs for a routine veterinary visit, so that much is under way. Now for the worst news.

My storage building is made of fabric with metal pipe supports. After twelve years of managing to get the snow load off using heat, this back-to-back heavy snow took down the one end of the building we had not braced up this past spring. I haven’t looked yet, but I’ll be calling insurance for the building and any damage which might have occurred to our RV and riverboat.