Snowpocalypse

Blessings, Darlings!

Back in February I said I'd eventually blog on Snowpocalypse. This is eventually, isn't it?

But really, what's to say? Washington, DC and environs got record snow, repeatedly, back in February.  But no ice.  The city closed down for a week, then more.  Our street got plowed once. Everyone got great exercise digging stuff out.  Gutters that had made it thru' the snow back in March of the year before came down all over town.  Store weren't restocked, and no one could get to them due to unplowed streets.  Electricity went down for a while.  OTOH, not too many water mains burst, since it wasn't that cold during it and snow is a great insulator.

We taught the neighbors to park cars towards the end of their driveways, so there is less area to dig out to get to the street.  And to dig out every few inches of snow, not the full 22 inches at once, because it's just easier both physically and mentally.  I dug out the fireplug on our street, which is right on the property line of our house and the unoccupied house next door.  Not everyone with a fire plug did this, which lead to problems in another part of town.  House on fire, and fire department couldn't find the fire plug to hook up hoses to.  Homeowner of the house where the fire plug is (not the house that burned) to this DAY says that it should not be HIS responsibility, he's an old man of 60, the city should pay folks to do that.  I consider him to be a flaming red diarrheal anus, personally, and he chooses ignores the LAW that says that it IS his responsibility.

Now, the Chubby Hubby and I had some FAIL during Snowmeggedon, too.  The worst was our failure in getting the generator going when power was out.  There we were, 18 inches of snow on the ground, more falling, wind howling.  Uh, where do we PUT the generator? No covered porch. No covered anything outside.  No cleared ground by the house.  We worked on clearing some of the patio, tried to rig up a tarp over an area to keep the snow off the genny.  FAIL. It wasn't deadly (obviously) or anything - power came on as we were fussing with it.  We'll have to figure out how to handle that in the house we're moving to - while the power/fuse box area is set up for a generator, there's no outdoor place to PUT it, especially in the snow.

People all over DC complained mightily that DC wasn't able to handle the snow and it should have been able to.  How silly.  If DC had enough equipment to handle this - a snow the like of which it has seen only one or two times before in 200 years - they'd have been screaming at the waste of having that much stuff on hand when it's rarely used.  It would be the equivalent of requiring anyone with a car to have 5 cars, in case 4 of them broke down at once. Or the equivalent of requiring every resident to own their own snow plow. Foolishness.  Wastefulness.

People can be such fools.

Frondly, Fern