thank god we found a plow guy

It snowed a bit last Thursday, and some yesterday, and a bunch last night and today. Last year, for some incomprehensible reason, we just never got around to finding someone to plow our driveway. Instead, we did it by hand, on several occasions – an utterly back-breaking experience. By mid-winter, when I I finally broke down and got someone to take a look at our situation, it was too late: the driveway had narrowed with the snow too much for the guy to fit his nine-foot plow blade. (It gets awfully hard to toss hundreds of shovel-fuls of snow up over 4 feet embankments.) Our neighbor likes to joke that by that point in the season, they’re one storm away from the Donner party.

So this year, after having shoveled out from one storm, we found a plow guy. The arrangement is that he’ll come for anything 3 inches and over. It occurred to me yesterday, what if we get a series of 2 inch dumps? Will he show up? Answer: Yes. Whew.

I’m so used to grabbing the camera every time I see a vehicle pull in the driveway – I just snapped a few photos.

We asked him to clear a path all the way back to the pole barn. First, it will give him a place to dump all the snow. But we also asked for a space behind the garage, and I’ll put my car there. Yes, my car, which is currently inside the garage. Why move a car that’s cosy in a garage to the outdoors? Because of the mice. Over the summer, we put the truck (pictured above) in the pole barn (the farthest away structure shown above), with the kayaks strapped to the top. Mice got in to the engine compartment and made a mess behind the fireproof fabric that lines the hood. Mmmm…mouse pee… kinda gross. So we’ll throw a tarp over it and call it good.

Anyway.

I just don’t have the heart to go running in this mess. The shoulders aren’t wide enough on the side of the road so there’s nowhere to retreat when cars go by. So we are contemplating buying a treadmill. Today, in a fit of cabin fever, I did the weights-portion of my cousin Emily’s recent at-home workout. Oh My God, I am so out of shape. OK, yeah, my most recent run was five and a half miles, but my muscle tone leaves a little something to be desired.

In other news, Kevin tossed the Christmas tree off the end of the deck. (This fits in well with my family’s tradition of throwing the tree out the window – a practice we started when we were renting the second and third floors of a house on a hill overlooking Lake Geneva. Tossing it out of the window was the easiest way to deal with it. Ah, memories…)