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earned my keep

We had some snow to deal with this morning.

Less than what I faced numerous times in Grangeville, Idaho, and certainly less than many parts of the country, but an unusually large amount for this part of the world.

A) The Darby Library has an unbroken record of opening as scheduled regardless of weather.

B) Missy and Mom were signed up to set the library up and open by 11:00 AM.

A + B means we had to have the driveway cleared before 10:30 AM.

JUST made it.

The three of us worked the deck, rails, sidewalk, and driveway. My part was to run the snowblower for two hours. I left the details to the girls.

I did another hour of snowpusher and snowshovel after they got out.

As the day warmed up to the mid-30s, snow avalanches kept falling off our metal roof. Diligence was due to prevent glaciers from forming in front of our entrance.

While there was a gap, the snow resumed falling this afternoon. By evening another 1.5 – 2 inches had landed on our clearings as well as the base everywhere we had not cleared.

We will be at it again tomorrow morning… with gotta go to church as the deadline.

A BIG Thank You to Snowblowers Direct for guiding the purchase of my first, last and only snowblower.

I researched extensively online and was pretty sure I knew what I wanted. I hold Honda in high esteem for their famous engines and typical high quality machines. Apparently Honda engineers got a bit carried away in the snowblower realm, replacing reliable mechanical components with unreliable electronic and motor driven parts. Here Ariens gets the good reviews.

The salesman steered me away from what I thought I wanted as the first snowblower I would ever operate in my life and into one far better suited to the amount of snowfall normal to my area and my ability to wrestle an over-large machine around with a smile on my face. Not to mention the several hundred dollars he cut off what I was trying to spend with them.

Happy with the choice. You betcha.

Here is a little 19-second video clip of me moving what otherwise would have been considered by my back, wrists, knees, etcetera as HEAVY, WET SNOW.

Feb 17 blowing 8 inches of snow from Ted Dunlap on Vimeo.