Dragging winter away kicking and screaming....

[captainsblog]

After any number of one-day teases, daytime temperatures, at least, are staying above freezing, and today, at least, the sun was out.  We'll take any sign of spring we can get. Eleanor noticed her first robins of spring earlier; both of us saw our first too-soon crazy women already trying out their flip-flops.

As for me, much of the dragging was literal. Any number of friends and neighbors spent hours yesterday clearing the skating rinks off their driveways; I stuck to just splatting our front steps with ice melt (barely keeping up with the runoff/refreeze cycle from the ice-filled gutter above it), and let the sun do its work. By the time I got home right after 6, a bit more than half the driveway was ice-free and dry; the closer-to-the-house half is in shadow and thus needed some serious whacking. It's not all done, but for one of the first times in all of 2015, there's a clear path from the street to our front garage mandoor and mailbox. The rest will go before I leave if tomorrow/Wednesday's even warmer promised temps don't finish it off.

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I also removed an unsightly blemish from inside the garage:



That bulbous blob is what you get when you don't shut the spigot completely off and the temperature in your garage goes below freezing for most of a month. By tonight, it had melted enough to separate it from the spigot, but surgery was required to remove the hose from inside the top of the thing. Once extracted, I realized it also had grown a perfectly lovely rectangular base that also had to be hauled out. I put it on the still-mountainous accumulation of snow on the left of our driveway so I could photograph it before the sun kills it tomorrow:



I see a Cousin It-ish snowman. Your dirty mind may vary;)

Comments

[yesididit.livejournal.com]

damn, if you leave your outside water turned on up here, you get busted pipes and massive water damage. i passed one house that had nobody living in it as it was for sale, and the water hadnt been shut off. there was ice pouring out the front door that was massive. it went from the bottom of the door up the door frame to above the doorknob. as it froze lower, the water just wicked up higher and higher and still found its way out. it went unchecked for some time, with nobody living there. it spread out across the front yard to the street, it went on for so long. they ended up having to bring in a backhoe in winter and dig out from the house water line all the way out to the street in order to finally shut it off. the ice outside was seriously epic. i cant imagine what it looked like inside.