Pete's Log: Snow Days
Entry #1884, (Homeownership, Life in General)(posted when I was 42 years old.)
Our divergence from the norm here has been nowhere near as extreme as elsewhere in the country, but it's still been an interesting few days. I think this is as much snow as I've seen since I moved to Illinois.
Through this past weekend we had already seen above-average snowfall and had some good snow accumulation around our house. The backyard pile I was making from snow off our driveway was already about my height. To add to this situation, the weekend into Tuesday gave us another foot of snow, and we've had another couple inches since then.
Monday was a holiday, so Tuesday we had some good shoveling to do to start our work week. When I got home from dropping JB off at daycare, I managed to slide the front tire off the driveway about halfway to the garage. Our neighbor across the street had been shoveling his sidewalk and was kind enough to come help get the car unstuck. His wife had called out congratulations to us shortly after JB was born and I used the opportunity to finally learn their names, so that felt good.
Further shenanigans that morning led to our car battery dying. Jamie's dad was kind enough to stop by to give us a jump. But while we were in the garage before he got there, I heard the sound of spinning tires from the alley. I went back to look and found a van stuck in the snow. I helped him dig out a bit, but he got stuck again a few feet later. A colleague of his showed up and they made their way out of the alley a couple feet at a time.
Wednesday was relatively uneventful.
This morning we noticed we had some water seeping through our living room ceiling. We've had some pretty bad ice dams develop over the past few days, but had checked the attic and not found anything. The fact that nine out of ten houses in Brookfield seem to have ice dams as bad or worse than ours was a bit of consolation. I realized the spot where water was coming in seemed to be where our living room roof met the second story brick wall. There's flashing where the roof meets the wall, but it seems likely it's not 100% water tight. I managed to get the snow off the roof at that point, but it's hard to tell if the situation's been fully resolved.
We researched some options for dealing with ice dams, and aside from the preventive maintenance we'll need to do in future, we found suggestions of filling panty hose with salt to melt a channel through the ice dam. We stopped by several area hardware stores to try to find a roof rake, but those were all sold out. We did manage to buy some panty hose to fill with salt. We grabbed some delicious tacos at a local BBQ joint while we were out and intended to proceed filling some panty-hose-salt-hot-dogs after we ate.
While eating lunch, something caught my eye outside and I realized somebody had gotten stuck in our driveway. It was a small car and the plows must've just come by since they were stuck on a good pile of snow. One of our neighbors was out with his kid and dog and trying to help push the car out of our driveway. Jamie and I headed out with shovels and we got the car dislodged. Our neighbor continued his walk and we almost made it to our door before we noticed that he was already helping another stuck car.
This one had tried to use the alley to turn around. Again it was a small car with no clearance and the driver had got it stuck on top of the compacted snow real good. He was basically getting no traction on his tires. Another neighbor had come out to help as well, bumping up our neighbors met count once more. Lots of digging and pushing hadn't gotten us anywhere, but a state trooper happened to drive by and was able to use a chain to save the day.
So counting our own car, we helped get four vehicles unstuck from the snow in the past three days. This is well above average.
I was then finally able to toss some of the panty-hose sausages onto our roof. Hopefully they make a difference.
This afternoon we noticed our elderly neighbor to the South was trying to dig a path through her backyard. We went out to offer our help, but she insisted it was good exercise. She then went on to talk about how things would be when the snow melts, asking us if we remembered the snowfall of 1979. No, not really...
