Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

It's been a weird day. I worked the graveyard shift this morning and, even though it was fairly warm out, the ground didn't get the memo. The fine, misty rain froze as soon as it hit the pavement, resulting in really slippery sheets of black ice. I almost did several faceplants as I was walking through the parking lot at work. The temperature continually rose through the wee hours of the morning, until it was pushing 60F. The dangerous black ice situation resolved itself by 4AM.

When I finally got home this morning, it was about fifty degrees and a light rain was falling. I found my next door neighbor, who is retired and is living with her hundred year-old mother, juggling an umbrella and a snow shovel, and attempting to clear a mound of snow in front of her house in order to clear a parking spot for her sister, who often comes over to watch mom when my neighbor runs errands. I couldn't watch my neighbor try to pull off this juggling act, so I decided to lend a hand.

I spent about half an hour breaking up the large mounds of snow in front of our two houses, and scattering the resultant chunks throughout the gutter so that the combination of warmth and water could melt them. I don't know why this isn't done on a grander scale- in these parts, the mountains of dirty snow tend to linger until April, especially in large parking lots.

Currently, there is very little snow remaining from Friday's storm, which dumped almost a foot of fine powder on the ground. As tonight is supposed to be characterized by an extreme drop in temperature (we're talking a sixty degree drop over the course of twenty-four hours), that's a good thing.