Here in the east we mostly use fuel oil to heat our homes. Our fuel tank is in our basement with the filler spout on the side of the house behind a gate on the opposite side of the house from the garage. About every five or six weeks we can except a fuel delivery. Which means I have to keep a path clear so that the gate will open and the poor man can drag his hose to fill us up.

Not being used to this kind of thing after living in Colorado where our natural gas was piped in via underground gas lines it took me awhile to catch on. I won’t easily forget during our first winter here we had some snow and then an ice storm. I didn’t do anything with the snow on that side of the house because, hey, no one ever went over there. The fuel oil delivery came and he could not get in the gate. I got the shovel out and there was no way to move that snow. I was pretty mortified when he finally just climbed over our fence. Lesson learned.

Our fuel tank holds 350 gallons. We usually get filled up at around half-way and are on an auto-fill program which means they schedule us when they think we need it. Our last delivery was five weeks ago and our fuel indicator was telling us we were below half. I’ve been anticipating his arrival for a few weeks now so I have dutifully shoveled a path every time it snows. He came Friday so that means I can relax for a while in hopes that whatever we get will melt before he comes again. Fat chance.

We are running out of places to push, pile and clear the snow from our street. Not a wide street to begin with, it has now become smaller and narrower with each storm. One more snow and most people’s mailboxes will not be visible. Snow is piled higher than the roof of my car in some spots where driveways have been plowed.

At our local strip mall where the grocery store is the snow is really piled high. It’s difficult to see beyond them to check for oncoming traffic before pulling out. Dangerous! Yesterday while picking up dog food at the feed store I tried going out one of their entrances and found I could not see, so ended up backing up and going out the other entrance which had more visibility.

Bella’s coat is soft and downy like a puppy’s coat. Every time it snows she comes in with huge snowballs attached to her chest, belly and legs. I towel her off which helps a little bit but the only way to get them off I’ve found is to squish them flat with my fingers and let her thaw. This makes a mess everywhere as you can imagine. The other day I let her in and got her towelled and “squished” and went off doing my thing. In the meantime she had gone upstairs and laid on our bed. Everything was soaking wet and I ended up putting Rick’s pillow in the dryer.

Where do I begin? Normally I try to scoop at least every other day when there isn’t snow on the ground. As it stands now I might scoop every four or five days depending on the weather. It’s more like playing a game of “kick the poop” than anything else because that’s exactly what I have to do to dislodge it from its icy prison. Of course, there is no getting the frozen snow/ice off that surrounds it so it has to come along for the ride too. This makes for a very heavy trash bag.

Since the snow arrived on December 26, 2010 we have not seen bare ground. So whatever did not get scooped before said blizzard is still under there. Somewhere. We’ll call that the pre-blizzard layer. That got covered by 20 inches of snow. Whatever the dogs did after the blizzard did not get scooped. Then we had two more storms of 5 inches and 7 inches and most of that is still on the ground. I tried in-between to scoop whenever anything surfaced but I’m certain most of it got buried. Then we have what I like to call the crustaceous layer which occurred after our snow, ice and freezing rain storm. On top of the crustaceous layer we have another 8 to 9 inches of snow. Are you getting the picture?

I am going to need a dump truck when it all melts or maybe I’ll just hook the trailer up to Johnny and drive around with a big shovel. Can’t wait for that event.

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