Tag: winter
19MAR2025 – Photo of the Day
14MAR2025 – Photo of the Day
08MAR2025 – Photo of the Day
Now That’s Showmanship
Ah, Groundhog Day. When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up. After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate. The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit. This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement. Almost any depth of snow can be removed. 0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel. 2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow. After that it get trickier, but it can still be done. And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.
A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster. If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it. Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway. That’s very unfortunate. Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface. This works but it is extremely labor intensive. So, I hate rain in the winter. And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.
Alright, enough whining.
So, what’s new? Well, tariffs. Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places. And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed. Wow. Trump is going full steam ahead. Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do? Nothing.” But then he does three more things. One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s. These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country. Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens. Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem. I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with. I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better. Sort of an anti-Obama.
Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week. If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote. And that’s actually me being optimistic. There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate. McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train. I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI. Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby. This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.
Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data
As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie. So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic. Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.
We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say). I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow. This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end. But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth). I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens. Now that’s showmanship.
28JAN2025 – Photo of the Day
27JAN2025 – Photo of the Day
26JAN2025 – Photo of the Day
Zen and the Art of Snow Removal
In New England choosing a snow removal method is kind of like choosing a religion. There’s the mainstream snowblower sect. Then there are those plow guys both the ones that mount it to their family truck and the ones who buy those ATV looking vehicles that zip around after major snowstorms cleaning off people’s driveways. They’re probably pagans or something. Then there are the hardliners who own a tractor to which they can attach plows, blowers, even trailers in which the snow can be collected. These guys are ready for the apocalypse. And finally, there are the fundamentalists; the shovel guys. To them moving the snow is the punishment we all deserve.
A week ago, I was walking in the haunted forests and swamps of Dunwich and observing the first little buds and leaves opening up on all the thorn bushes, briars and poison ivy vines. But now there’s eight inches of snow out there again!
And so, I spent Tuesday and today on snow removal. I skipped Wednesday because, dammit I’m an American. My weapons were the snowblower, the snow shovel and the ice scraping shovel (technically it’s a roofing shovel used to scrape the shingles off a roof, but it’s really good for smashing and scraping ice off a driveway). And I got all of the top driveway done and the lower driveway so-so.
And that’s just in time for tonight’s predicted one to four inches of new snow. Now what kind of prediction is 1-4 inches? When the maximum is 400% of the minimum it shouldn’t be called a prediction. Clueless guess is probably closer to the truth. But the last five hours of snow removal has brought me back to the zen-like state that eventually sets in near the end of a New England winter. And this is even true during extremely mild winters as we’ve had the last three or four years. Because an inch of ice can cause more grief and work than two feet of dry snow. In the zen state you abandon the idea of gritting your teeth and pushing through until spring. It’s too long. There are still seven weeks until snow is unlikely. So, you must embrace the crappy weather and become one with it.
And so there I was, lavishing loving attention on asphalt that needed the snow coaxed off of it with a light, almost delicate touch to the shovel at just the perfect angle to get it to peel off the pavement. I experienced ineffable contentment as I worked down the driveway six inches at a time. I had become a snow clearing zombie. And I loved Big Brother.
As you can tell I’m suffering from the last stages of cabin fever and I’m contemplating warning Camera Girl to abandon the Compound until spring when hopefully I’ll regain my sanity. She knows my weaknesses and it’s just too reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in the movie version of “The Shining.” If I do go berserk, I won’t use the weapons that Jack Torrance took up (a fire axe in the movie and a roque mallet in the book). I will instead embrace my most formidable weapon, bad puns. The poor woman.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the posting of my novel fragment. It’s cathartic to put it out in the real world and get feedback. I’ve been trying to figure out a strategy to get it in the public eye. I’m thinking about putting it on a crowd-funding site to see how much visibility that would give it. If anyone knows which sites are best for our side of the political spectrum, please chime in.
Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 17JAN2024 – Vermont Driveway Survival
Before we escaped the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont, I would stretch a poly tarp over my car. This covered the windshield, side windows and the door locks. A couple of bungie cords kept it tight. Come out in the morning, or night, and pop it off and the ice/snow/frost came with it. No scraping, and especially no fumbling trying to get keys into frozen locks. (Yes, this was back in the Ice Age when I was a specialist in stone knives and bearskins.)