Winter Is a Comin' In

Autumn is in full swing now. All the trees are a riot of color. My yard is covered with leaves. I'll be raking like a madman soon enough. Not that I really mind. I love the leaves. I love autumn. I love the crisp feeling the air gets to it. Soon enough comes the winter though. I read just the other day that they (whoever "they" are) are forecasting a cold snowy winter, even worse than last year. And last year was pretty bad. We had feet of snow last year. So much snow that we ran out of places to pile it. So much snow that I separated the cartilage in my ribs trying to shovel the stuff. See, I have an oddly shaped driveway. It's sort of triangular. Up by the house, it's wide enough to park four cars across with room to spare. On one side, it's long enough for three cars to fit in end to end. On the other side, it tapers to a point. It may not sound like much, but that adds up to a lot of square footage. And when it's buried under twelve inches of snow, it takes a lot of shovelling to clear it out. To make matters worse, being wide enough to park four cars side-by-side, my driveway has a lot of frontage along the street. That means a lot of linear feet for the city snow plows to plow in. And it never fails that just as I'm finishing clearing the entire thing, the plow comes through and piles up a nice berm along the entire width of my driveway. You haven't lived until you have to dig out a 45 foot long snow plow berm...by hand...twice in the same day. Well, I'm not going to do it again. I am too old to be shovelling that much snow two or three times a week. (My readers in Russia and Sweden will know what I'm talking about.) So this year, I'm buying a snow blower! A nice, big, powerful snow blower. One that can auger its way through anything that Mother Nature can throw at it. One that will enable me to clear the driveway in a quarter of the time that it did last year. Like the one in the picture. (That's not me either; I just wanted to include a picture for all of my readers who live in countries where they don't have snow and so don't need such things as snow blowers.) And won't I be a happy camper then. Let it snow all that it wants to this year. I'll be ready for it. Now all I need is a roof rake.