Winter 2002-2003
The winter of 2002-2003 was, as it happened, the first year we owned a house, not to mention it also being the first year we lived in a house with a driveway that was more than a token length long. Our rental house in Essex Junction had a driveway that was only two car lengths or so long; our driveway in Richmond looks to be about a tenth of a mile, perhaps less. (Note from Jay: I suck at judging distances.) We had the idiotic idea that we could just gun it up the driveway in our two-wheel-drive Oldsmobile and Toyota sedans and that we could shovel our way out of anything too deep to gun it through.
We were quickly disabused of this point of view after the first really good snow fell in November. Shortly thereafter, we found ourselves at Sears buying a snowthrower attachment for our Sears riding mower, and then we spent three days getting the mower deck OFF the tractor and assembling and mounting the snowthrower. Then we had to learn how to use it , how to keep the chains from coming off, and so on. Our misadventures and misfortunes were many. Along the way we put our car into the ditch alongside the foot of our driveway TWICE, and put the tractor into the ditch once too. AAA towed the car out both times, but we had to pay to have the tractor towed out, it not being covered by the AAA insurance. The oil company spun its wheels off the driveway once and excavated a three-foot deep hole next to the driveway too. In the end, we worked out the "best practices" of using the snowthrower and came to the conclusion that a LOT of reflectors on posts, clearly marking where the driveway actually runs, are not just a good idea, they're a necessity.
The little spreader cart in the photos below (which show us giving the snowthrower a try once we had it all together) seemed like such a good idea, but in the end, we had to take it off. We could either mount the spreader or a big plastic canister full of fifty pounds of sand, and it turned out that without the sand the tractor had no traction. (The canister came with the snowthrower.) Until we buy a set of official Sears Craftsman wheel weights, we'll have to spread sand with a manual spreader and leave the little towed spreader in the garage.
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