I live in a side street off South Park and Inglis. I spent 40 minutes Friday afternoon with a tiny metal spade, pushing the snowbank back about 4 feet, one spadeful at a time, and digging down until I exposed the entire curbside sewer. I was never so glad to see a rusty storm sewer in all my life. Saturday afternoon when walking back home from downtown, I noticed the enormous bulldozer tire tracks all over the streets, right into the curb … completely covering up with packed down slush ‘n snow all the stormwater sewers that civic-minded neighbours had broken their backs to uncover in anticipation of the Saturday night rain. How stupid and incompetent can “professional” winter clearance crews be? Lucky for you I think of my neighbours, not just myself, so I dug out the storm sewer a SECOND TIME. This Sunday morning I dug yet more of the snowbank back towards the curb, chopping out drainage channels through the bulldozer-packed-down hard slush to speed up the draining of the lake of water in my driveway. Facilitating the drainage of water should be part of routine winter maintenance to prevent flooding and flash freezing. Oh wait, I can hear my Mum again: “Whatever happened to common sense?” —Both My Elbows Are Now Tennis’d and My Back is Broken
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2015.
A whole 40 minutes!??!!
Tennis elbows and bad back from one 40 minute ice and snow clearing session! Sounds like you are horribly out of shape. You need to take better care of yourself. You’re not getting any younger.
Try digging catch-basins.
It could be worse. Try dodging hipsters, terror-tots and screeching amateur musicians at the farmer’s market! You’ll wish you were back home chopping ice and shovelling snow with your buddy, the hipster hater, working at your side.
All wise-cracking aside, the bottom line is that if you can afford to own a home near the corner of South Park and Inglis you are more fortunate than 99% of the population. You can probably afford to hire someone to come and do a bit of shovelling if you are that concerned about it. It would save your back and elbows. Just sayin’!
It is discouraging when you shovel snow and then the snow removal people put the snow back where you had recently shovelled.
You should have seen the boulders the size of a smart-car they left at the end of my driveway yesterday that I had to hack apart with a plastic shovel.