The Joys of Home-Ownership

As you all probably already heard, the NYC area was hit this weekend with record snowfall. So much for our mild winter! 26.9 inches of snow were measured in Central Park late this afternoon. In our own yard, and much earlier in the day, we measured only 16 inches. Russ took the picture of the tape measure when he started shoveling snow - I would guess that at least another two inches fell after that. I've seen bigger blizzards than this one - after all, I was there when the blizzard of '78 hit Massachusetts, though I can't say I really remember much of it. But bear in mind that I'm a Hawaii-girl now, and I don't think I like all this white stuff everywhere!

The next two images below were taken by Russ from our front door, about twenty-four hours apart. He took the first one yesterday at around 10:30 a.m., and the second one was from this morning.

No, that's not the same car parked there in front of our neighbor's house.

As you can see, nobody on our street had even begun to dig out yet.

So anyway, of course probably the greatest joy of home-ownership is getting to shovel your driveway when it snows, or at least paying someone else to do it, which our two able-bodied selves are too stubborn and/or cheap to do. Between the two of us, Russ and I must have put in a total of eight or nine man-hours shoveling the driveway and cleaning off our cars.

Russ got started on the driveway first while I made a whole bunch of cookie dough. I was afraid he might not be able to get into the garage to get the shovels, but since he was able to take this photo from inside our garage, I guess it wasn't a problem. :)

When I finished making the cookie dough (I still haven't actually baked the cookies yet), I thought the kitties should experience snow. I tried to get them to peek outside the back door, but they were too scared and ran away. So instead I brought the snow inside for them. Of course, Spammy wasted no time taking it out of the bowl and getting it all over the floor.

After a couple hours of shoveling, Russ came inside for some rest, so I got bundled up and went outside to continue.

Our driveway is somewhat difficult to shovel. It's not that it's espeically long... Instead, it's because for a good fifteen or twenty feet, our driveway is surrounded immediately by our house on one side, and our neighbor's fence on the other. My parents' house has a much longer driveway, so when I used to shovel it as a kid, I could just make a path down the middle, and then push the remaining snow off to either side. Not so with this driveway. We have to push all the snow in the middle stretch all the way to either the front or the back of the house, and when there's a foot and a half of snow, it makes for a rather time-consuming task.

The other issue with our very narrow driveway is figuring out the best way to park our cars before a storm hits. We've tried parking both our cars near the end of the driveway, but it's very difficult to get the snow off the cars when there's so little room to move, and so little space to put the snow. This time, we both parked our cars on the street. Perhaps that would have worked just fine if there were only six or so inches of snow, but with the foot and a half we got, it was a real pain to dig out the cars in addition to to shoveling the entire driveway. Oh, and I thought the picture of our garbage can was kind of cute, but I don't have anything in particular to say about it.

Russ says he likes to shovel snow, that it's fun (at least he's said that up until today). Of course, I think that's crazy talk. At the very least, it's the talk of someone who hasn't had to shovel out of a blizzard before. When we finished, I took this picture of Russ standing next to the nice big pile of snow we made in our back yard. He doesn't look as excited as he should for someone who likes to shovel snow...


In this pitcture you might also notice a tree in the background that doesn't seem to be doing so well. I don't think that tree was leaning at such an angle before today, and we're worried that it might fall right down onto one of our neighbor's back yard chimney-oven thingies, and maybe even our other neighbor's garage, not to mention all the fences in between. So now we have to look for a tree-removal service. Mmm... the joys of home-ownership!