Wow, the snowblower works
Yesterday we got about three inches of snow in the morning. It was enought that I finally had an opportunity to fire up our new snowblower -- first time I've had to since we bought it in November, if you can believe it. That's been due to a stretch of unseasonably warm winter weather followed by a stretch of unseasonably dry winter weather.
I haven't really stressed about it, because I figure even if I don't use it this season, I'll end up using it next season. I've lived on Cape Cod long enough that I've seen drier winter seasons followed by really nasty winter seasons as well. (In fact, with Emmeline's 10th birthday bearing down on us tomorrow, that marks our tenth anniversary living here -- we moved, quite literally, when she and Bonnie came home from the hospital.)
We got a stretch of sunshine in the afternoon that thawed things enough that whatever the snowblower didn't pick up ended up melting anyway. Chances are I could have blown it off and it would have disappeared, but I felt better about getting rid of it -- man against nature and all that. And in all honesty, I probably *wouldn't* have bothered if I'd had to do it without a snowblower.
I think I need to adjust the skid plates on the bottom of it because I got a bit of gravel mixed in with the snow (our driveway is unpaved). But not nearly as much as I have when I've had to shovel the driveway by hand.