TUESDAY: 12 hours until Death Storm '07. I have taken the day off in anticipation of the 10-20" of snow we are supposed to get come nightfall. I head to Home Depot to get an ice chopper. Actually, I head to Wal-mart first, but they didn't have any. Then I head to Home Depot, which has them right inside the front door. Time spent in HD: 1 minute. I spend all afternoon chopping ice in the driveway. I want the driveway to be flat before Death Storm '07 arrives. Unfortunately, the driveway is so long that I come nowhere near my goal. Time to hope for the best.
At 9pm, Death Storm '07 arrives. Until that point, I had been regretting taking the day off since 7 of the 10 hours I would spend at work have been fine weather-wise. As the snow falls, and fast, I no longer regret my decision.
WEDNESDAY: It snows and snows and then it snows some more. It never stops snowing. People who have died during Death Storm that I know of: 0. But that number could shoot up at anytime. (Simpsons reference) I shovel and shovel. By the time I am done shoveling, the place where I started from needs to be shoveled again. We are getting 1-3" an hour. After I am done shoveling, the landlord comes by with a snowblower.
As much as I would love to go to work, I can't because snow emergencies have been declared in every county I have to pass through. Travel bans are issued. When I call in to work, they give me a confirmation number, which has never happened before. I hope it means that they are going to pay those who couldn't come in.
THURSDAY: I call into work again, which means when I finally go back on Monday, it will have been a week since I worked. The irony is that all the shoveling I am doing is more work than what I actually do at work. My back hurts and I am exhausted and grumpy. The "good" news is that there is more snow coming tonight.
FRIDAY: Good Lord. When I head out to shovel the driveway so my wife can go to work, I see that about another foot has fallen. When will it end? Where will I put it all? I can not recall another winter in my adult life when I have shoveled snow over my head. The banks are so high that I have to cross my fingers and hope for the best when I back out of the driveway. No cars coming, no cars coming, no whammys, stop! Go!
That afternoon, Kasey wants to play outside so I decide to do as much shoveling and ice chopping as I can muster the strength to do. I am defeated. Demoralized. My back hurts and I can't do this anymore. I say I can't do this anymore out loud. Then my next door neighbor, Paul, shows up and says his buddy is coming with a plow and he'll do my driveway too. (Our driveways touch so he kind of has to.) I make a mental note to submit this to the Vatican as proof of God.
I continue to shovel so that I can get the car out of the way when I hear a KABOOM! It seems a gigantic sheet of ice with icicles still attached has just fallen off the roof. It came about 6 inches from hitting my car. (I should also mention that ice falling on Monday cracked my wife's windshield. We had it replaced and the landlord offered to take it off our rent. Nice guy.) The ice missed my car by 6 inches and ME by a foot. It was a total WHOA moment for me. I pick up the 40 or 50 pounds of the Abominable Snowman's dentures and toss them into a snowbank. As I do this, the next gigantic ice block slides off the roof and hits the spot where I had been standing during the first KABOOM! Basically, if the things had fallen in a different order, I'd be dead.
People who have died during Death Storm '07 that I know of: Still 0. Barely.
1 comment:
OH LORD!! What a nightmare!!!!!!! Someone was watching over you when that ice fell that's for sure! I wish we had more snow, but not THAT much snow! YIKES! We just paid the neighbors to plow our driveway and will do so from now on. It's just not worth the labor it takes to clear snow. Take it easy will ya'?
Love,
L
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