The news in Singapore probably gave it a passing mention: the sky dropped a huge amount of snow on Michigan yesterday. At least 10 tons of which landed on my driveway. How do I know it was 10 tons? I'll skip the math, but suffice to say, I feel the weight with every muscle in my sore body.
I started winter thinking that shoveling snow would be good exercise. After all, there is no need to mow the lawn in winter. The first snow with enough accumulation to need shoveling was this Wednesday. I shoveled the driveway, Jia Nin did the sidewalk and the walkway up to the front door (aerial view of the house from a previous post). The only indication that I might have future trouble was that it took 2 hours.
Then it snowed yesterday for 10 whole hours, from 4am to about 2pm. Following the advice of experienced friends, I tried to keep ahead of the snow pile by clearing the driveway at about 10am, before it got too deep to lift a shovelful. About 6-8 inches had fallen by then. (No, I didn't go in to work. When there is a severe weather warning in the U.S. telling you travel is discouraged, you listen very carefully. But I digress.)
Three words describe the effort: tiring, cold, oh-i-see. Tiring because the snow was wet and heavy and there was alot of it. Cold because the temperature was -4 degrees celcius and the wind kept throwing snow in my face. oh-i-see occurred around 10:30am when every single one of my neighbors rolled out their motorized snow-throwers and were all done clearing snow within 30 minutes. After 2 whole hours, I had only cleared enough to ensure my car could get to the road, roughly 1/2 the driveway. I didn't even have the energy to clear Jia Nin's side of the garage.
And the snow kept coming. So I started to do research on snow-throwers. Lots of research, very fast.
By 3pm, it was clear that the snow was done. I went out and cleared the sidewalk (by law, the homeowner has 72 hours to clear the sidewalk of snow, or risk fines), the walkway to the front door, and re-shoveled the 4 additional inches which came down on the driveway. That took another 90 minutes.
That was I when called the nearest vendor and placed a order for a Honda HS520AS snow-thrower.
I picked it up this morning, did some grocery shopping, had lunch and came home. Fired it up and was done in 20min. Holy. Cow. The ease. The speed. Why oh why did I ever think exercise was a good thing. :-)
These photos are of the walkway to the front of the house. I did this part manually, hence the very lumpy surface due to snow shoveled and thrown there. (Check out shots of the house
without the snow for comparison!)
This side of the driveway was packed full of snow (including snow shoveled over from the other side of the driveway) before I started today. Now, all clear.
Moral of the story: A chore is a chore first and exercise last.
