Perpetual Ruminations

Baby It's Cold Outside!

It's been a long time since I've made any entries here, but after answering Question Of The Day with my plans on clearing snow and staying inside where it's warm, I had a request made to do a blog entry about it.

Snow fun is something I could write about, but clearing snow isn't snow fun, in fact, it's actually no fun. Thankfully I did purchase a small, single-stage snowblower last year. I used it a couple of times, but we really didn't get much snow. Over Christmas weekend, however, we got close to a foot and it was nice having a snowblower instead of trying to shovel and move that much snow. Yesterday we had another six to nine inches come down, but I didn't clean up much of it, yet. I did clear the steps and made a path to the garage with the snow shovel, but shortly after I finished it snowed more and left another four inches to clean up.

I should be outside cleaning up from this last snowfall, but I'm having difficulties motivating myself. First of all, my back still aches a bit from my last snow removal ordeal; even with a small snowblower, there was plenty of shoveling. Also, it is a small snowblower and not quite big enough for the amount of snow we have. See, I should have gotten a bigger, two-stage, self-propelled machine to tackle as much snow clearing as I need.

But, when I purchased this one, I thought all I would need is something to clear the patio and the sidewalks. Our landlord hires someone to plow the driveway and keep it cleared. But, I learned that even though he has a truck with a plow, he either doesn't know how to plow or he just doesn't care that he does a horse-shit job. Therefore, I fid myself needing to clean up in front of the garage and around my pickup, as well as make a path to the dumpster. Yes, I did mention to the landlord that he does a terrible job, and so have the other tenants.

In fact, I even took pictures of the job he did after Christmas and showed him how bad it was. He called and talked to the snow remover guy so now he left even a bigger mess. Sometimes it's better not to complain, you see. But, it all works out and I know this will too. In the meantime, however, I need to go move some more snow.

This brings me to the second part of my demotivation, it's cold out. Sure, it must be cold if we get snow, right? No, I mean it's arctic cold out. We had a low of negative twenty-six this morning and it still has not reached our forecasted high of negative six; I don't think we will get out of the negative teens myself. Tonight it's back down in the negative twenties and it's not looking like we will see it above zero until next week. So, to do much outdoors, I need to put on a lot of warm clothing.

The problem with this is two-fold. One, with so many layers of clothing, it begins to get difficult to move freely. All those clothes tend to restrict movement, as well as just being uncomfortable. The other problem is, with all those layers of clothing to keep the cold out, they also keep the heat in. I know, that's the idea. But, what I mean is, they hold too much heat in so that when a person is working, they sweat. The sweat makes the clothing damp and then it's back to getting cold.