Digging out

Mother Nature didn't disappoint, it did snow last night into today morning. At 6:30 am today it was a full-on blizzard with wind and snow and vague sounds of things hitting the roof and what-not. We got about 6/7 inches of snow and although it wasn't enough to keep me home all day, it at least gave me the chance to go to work late after making myself a nice big breakfast.

Digging the car out of the snow is fun. It's like a game. The objective of the game is to accomplish the following : To dislodge the car from it's remote location deep inside its snow coccoon and make it travel-ready with the least amount of manual labor and time involved. I have whittled this game down to a science. This is how I do it.

Most people spend a huge amount of time scraping mountains of snow off their car using a snow shovel. That is just foolish and time ill-spent. My technique in doing the same involves wearing a waterproof jacket which covers most of your frontal body area. What you do is the following. You stand on the side of your car with or without an adoring look in your eyes. Then you open your arms wide as if to give your car a massive bear hug. Next, you jump on your car, hugging it passionately, so very very closely as if to invite it to enter your very soul. Then, you slide your entire body along the length of the car, taking along with you all the snow that sits atop it. Repeat it on the other side. Trust me. This will save you at least 5 minutes of shovelling time.

Then, the next thing to do is to shovel the snow in front of and behind the tires and you are all set to go. If that doesn't work, keep shovelling till it does. It usually ceases to be a fun game if it doesn't work after the first shovel.

As expected, the authorities had not bothered to plow the roads after the storm. But they did take some measures. What they did was station police cars at the entry to the highway so that no one could get onto it. No, really, that's what they did. Instead of assigning plowtrucks to clear the highway, they assigned cop cars to shut down the highway. Now that's called innovative thinking.