Picture courtesy of William Sutherland
I have lived through two blizzards in my lifetime. Both were in Pennsylvania and I thought both were super exciting! The first one was in 1993 and when I heard we were having a blizzard I was convinced that it would be as bad as the blizzards I had read about in the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was disappointed when my mom told me we wouldn’t have to run a clothesline to our garage/chicken coop so we would be able to feed the chickens during the storm.
It was a lot of snow, it was delightful going out to play in it, and we amused ourselves by keeping tabs on our neighbor’s Christmas lawn ornament which slowly disappeared under the accumulating snow.
After it finished snowing came the fun part: shoveling the snow. I remember helping a little, but the fun part came just as my dad finished shoveling off the front walkway. The snow was already starting to melt a little and a whole pile fell off the tin roof right on top of the spot he had just cleared! We were thankful that he wasn’t hurt!
The second blizzard came just a few years later. That winter there was quite a bit of weather. People don’t usually move during the winter, but we did that year. The weekend we moved was the only weekend we didn’t have some sort of Weather. There was SO much snow it was crazy. I remember watching the evening news with my family (part of our current events curriculum for school!) and seeing the news story that they were having snow removal problems. There was so much snow that they didn’t know what to do with it after they had plowed the roads. One of the ways they decided to get rid of some of the snow was to dump it in the river. It was amusing seeing the huge dump trucks dump their pile of snow over the side of the bridge.
For some reason the phrase Snow Removal Problem tickled my fancy and it soon became a catch phrase around our house. Someone said something goofy? Why, they had snow removal problems! Someone did something off the wall? They also had snow removal problems!
When we moved to Florida I revived my old catch phrase to some ribbing from my family. I thought it even more funny then–if you had snow removal problems in Florida they would have to be pretty large!
So how about you? Anyone you know have some snow removal problems?