Procrastination Station

Life has been “interesting” around here this past week. The three days of snow, with accumulations of about 18”, would not be blog-worthy on its own, although it’s quite a lot of snow in one dump for this part of Alaska.

In spite of it being December and having had a couple of light snow events already, Jer had procrastinated. He had not hooked the plow up to the truck yet – even though that’s pretty much all we use it for these days and he’d talked about doing this three weeks ago.

No, that would have been fine, and we deal with worse most every winter. The misadventures started with a single lapse in preparedness – and snowballed (pardon the pun) from there.

If he HAD gone out to hook the plow up, he probably would have realized he’d neglected to switch out the regular all-season tires for the aggressively treaded, studded tires needed for snow removal on our fairly large property. The tires that were currently sitting in the barn under a tarp, waiting for October, when it’s legal to mount them. Sigh.

Jerry would have also noticed that the heavy Western plow, in spite of resting off-season on supportive bricks to avoid this very thing, had sunk, bricks and all, into the soft, spongy soil last summer’s weeks and weeks of unrelenting rain had created.

This would have been a fairly simple fix before the ground froze. But no; here we were on Wednesday morning, with 5-6” of snow on the frozen ground, more snow coming down, and the plow we so need is tilted slightly askew with one corner frozen solidly in the ground.

Winter … to be continued.