…off our roofs. I figure the church over there will go first, that and the flat roofed sections of the house across the street. But that snow was incredibly heavy and wet: a shovelful was a strain to lift, and I’m in pretty good shape.
Last Snowpocalypse, if you were with us then, we lost, in just our neighborhood, a modern grocery, more than 6 garages and carports, a Hancock’s Fabric Store, Mel’s Nursery and Gift Shop, and we were really worried about our ice rink—but the manager, no fool, spotted the snow removal team on the Wally-world-style store (Fred Myers) across the street and hired them to get the snow down. Jane and I are officially declaring ourselves too old and valuable to go onto the roof to move snow, but finding someone to do it who’s actually not apt to sue you if they fall off is not easy. So we’re really glad for the melt.
The small machine repair shop down the hill has so many snowblowers to repair it spent more time checking them in than fixing them, and has hundreds lined up to fix, most of them probably with broken or slipped belts. I’d have thought the big ones would take an ice berm from a snowplow, but apparently not: apparently they’re not supposed to. So the belts break or slip, or they screw up the motor beyond all repair. I love, love, love our little electric! It doesn’t require annual service, I suspect it doesn’t have a belt (gears), it’s light, and it starts like your vacuum cleaner…
We were going to go skate today, but I’m working on the hairiest bit of this redo, and I just want to be through this scene with my brain focused. So we’re sitting pat.
We’re going to have just cloudy weather until Monday when the snow starts again.
You probably don’t need to be reminded, but if you’ve got melting snow on your roof, beware of ice dams, which will route melting snow water under your roof shingles and into your walls and ceilings. Much more prevalent here in the Northeast, but I’m sure it could affect anyone with snow on the roof.
Thank goodness, we have the simplest extended pyramid of a roof, on both house and garage, all ‘out’ corners, but one, and we do keep an eye on that one fold where the porch comes out. We have a flat porch, our one Achilles heel!
I think that your mattock would be an effective tool for breaking up a snow dam across the end of your drive. At least to get it into chunks that would be moveable.
You betcha! We have an ice-axe sized one, tiny and sharp, a 4-tine mattock which is surprisingly efficient, and the mega-buster, the big 4″ blade with a pick on the other end. It hasn’t gotten to where we’re using a chisel and maul; Jane’s canny about weather up here and I had not a clue why she was going out in the early morning and fighting that berm—now I know, and let me tell you, a rebounding pick-axe will just rearrange your backbone and your wrists and elbows! So now we’re both out doing that job before it sets. Where it got us in 2009 was that it was snowing so hard the plows were working all night—(we’re a snow corridor AND a main city bus route) and thrown snow, as in an avalanche, sets like concrete given any chance at all. So by morning, it was already solid. We have less city budget, and maybe it just hasn’t been that bad at night, but the first plows come by at about 5 and that gives us a fighting chance.
Listen, you are both much to valuable even if, clearly, not too old to venture on the roof, in the ice and snow. Surely sk8er guy can find someone for that 😀
Minor trivia: Most snowblowers have shear pins which break and decouple the rotating blades from the shaft if the machine hits something hard. Mine has six of them. Ask me how I know this.
Anyway, if it happens to you, replacing the shear pin(s) is a pretty trivial task, compared to sending your machine to the shop.
I am glad to know that! If ours stops, I’m flinging off the cover to look for them.
PS: Yeah, you ladies stay off the roof.
We plan to. I get vertigo really easily, unfortunately, has to do mostly with my vision. Since the time I actually fell OFF a sand dune (about a 200 foot roll to the bottom including a 10 lb Polaroid Land Camera and a strap) I have been really quite respectful of high places. [I turned my head without knowing I was on the edge of a sheer drop, lost my footing on soft sand as I caught my balance, and made quite an interesting pattern on the dune face as I went down. —Great Sand Dunes National Park.] I don’t want to risk a lawn surfing!
We had an addition with a slightly sloped “flat” roof, and after the first disastrous year (we moved in in September, and had a snowstorm that shut the city down and caused serious damage to that roof), we invested in a “snow rake”. http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=snow+roof+rake&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=4657516637&ref=pd_sl_budcv6lka_b I highly recommend it. You and Jane probably have the strength to use one (tho v.v unwieldy) for those times you can’t get people up on the roof. You can get enough snow down to prevent collapse and ice dams. (Hoods are helpful, though.)
Thanks for that note!
It’s so silly, this vertigo thing but one eye doesn’t track quite evenly, and this makes my world warp ‘up’ like a space station corridor in one direction—I really worried when I took to figure skating that it would keep me from being able to balance properly on ice—but it didn’t really bother me. I’ve coped with it lifelong. I even do small jumps, which ALMOST gives me a problem: the real difficult is when my poor brain has to leave ordinary mapping of the surface and convert for ‘height’. It’s what makes the world torque when I jump on ice, when I stand at the rail of canyons and skyscrapers—real, real pit opens up on those—doesn’t bother me on airplanes, because I don’t see that kind of height as real distance, or anything that I have to balance on to cope with. But a roof? That’s too much like a sand dune! 😆
My Grandma had a snow rake for her roof: I think my uncle (her son) gave it to her one Christmas. I had a few extender lengths to it so you could reach up high, and was made of aluminum.