The Winter Of Our Discomfort

I think winter may finally be over.

Although, we did have snow last week. At least it did not stick.

I thought about using the title "The Winter Of Our Discontent."

I am pretty sure that has already been used. The Winter of Our Discount Tent didn't seem appropriate.

So, it was the winter of our discomfort here in Southeastern Wisconsin.

Winter came early this year. We never finished raking the leaves off the lawn. Our neighbor got the leaves raked and bagged, but it snowed before he ever got the bags off the front lawn. They have been sitting there all winter, a row of snow covered mounds. In fact, they are still there today. I wonder if he knows the city will pick them up if you rake the leaves to the road?

Not only did winter come early, but it stuck around and put its feet up.

Those first snows stuck and never got a chance to melt away. As soon as it seem like it would melt away, it would snow again. That was just the snow before the end of the year.

We have already set some records in snowfall this year.

What makes that interesting is that we still have additional snow to expect at the end of the year. Addtional snow then may make this a real record breaking year.

We have had lots of snow.

Not only did we have several storms the dropped about a foot of snow by themselves, but we had lots of snow in between. It seemed every week we had 2-3 snowfalls. Those smaller snowfalls were often in the 6 inch range themselves. One storm left an overhang of snow on our roof that bent the gutter.

This meant a lot of snow shoveling and snowblowing.

Early on one of the shear pins broke in our snowblower. It was only cleaning half the snow. Also, there was a shortage of shear pins at the dealers. I just used a bolt and nut. There should be half a dozen sets of nuts and bolts around the yard since I kept losing them all winter.

I live in a great neighborhood.

There seems to be a race to see who can do everyone's sidewalk first. Often, someone would snowblow our sidewalk just as a storm would end. I still had lots of chances to beat everyone else. Since I was at home most of the winter, I was able to snowblow in the afternoon before others got home from work. One advantage of working from home I guess. I bet there are not too many places you would see neighbors doing that.

Sidewalks are easy to snowblow, it's the driveway that takes time. Too much time. We have a large driveway.

The worst part is the city plowing in the driveways.

They seem to wait till you clean your driveway and then plow the snow into it. The last storm, 12 hours after the storm, I cleaned it 5 times only to literally have a plow come and plow me in each time as I finished. The driver even blew his horn at me once as I had my back to the traffic as he came by. He had to be enjoying that.

Anyway, it seems safe to say spring is finally here in Wisconsin.

I am glad. I miss warm weather badly. I am tired of being cold.

I know there many places that get more snow and got more snow than we did here in Wisconsin (including northern Wisconsin itself). I only have one thing to say about places like that. I might want to visit, but I would not want to live there.

So, I am welcoming spring! Even though it was supposed to have started several weeks ago. You will not hear me complain about hot weather in summer. I look forward to it.