Digging out of the snow - when to call for help

We got 14 inches of snow the other night. They had predicted 1" - 3" so I wasn't fully prepared for the level of digging required. Normally, if I know there's going to be a ton of snow, I'll start parking my car closer to the street. But, oh no, not Friday night. I figured it was safe to pull closer in towards the house.

Saturday morning, we woke up to a surprise. Well, around here, a foot of snow isn't too surprising. Usually my son can help but he had to go to work, so the focus was digging out the car he drives and getting him down the hill using the first pass the city snowplow made. 

So, while he did that (apparently, I was in the way), I worked on shoveling the deck, the stairs, the walkways and, finally, my own car. Fortunately, the snow was light and fluffy so it could have been a lot worse. About midway through, when I realized that I still had a looooong way to get the driveway cleared to the road, I decided to, basically, just get everything ready to be plowed by someone else. No sense in breaking my back hand shoveling when I could hire someone to come and do a job that would only take 10 - 15 minutes using the right equipment. Plus, the city plow was due to come by and create the street side berm of ice and snow that is notoriously difficult to move.

If Henry were around, we probably could have made short work of it. And, even if we both shoveled for another hour or so, it wouldn't resolve the issue that we'd be pretty much berming ourselves into 2 narrow parking spots. So, when the hired big guns arrived later that night at 5 pm (basically a truck with a plow attached to the front), I instructed them to push all the snow to both sides of our double lot, creating a massive parking pad. This way, if we get more snowstorms, we're not trying to shovel above our piles, like has happened in the past.

I don't own an expensive diesel chomping snow-annihilator like some of my neighbors. I have a super environmentally friendly, battery powered snowblower that works on powdery snow, less than 3 inches deep. And, honestly, it really only works well on flat pavement, not on sloped gravel. It's actually less physical effort to hand shovel than use this thing. This is where I get punished for being an environmentalist. But, it's one of the trade-offs for living in the mountains. The city has been good about clearing and sanding the roads. As long as you can get to the roads. (The street berm is another story.)

Which leads us to the final point... why don't I just park in the street and then move the cars around when the city snow plows? Because doing the vehicle shuffle is far more stressful - you never know when the plow is going to come by, and I'd rather suffer with shoveling to have access to my driveway up to my house by putting in the effort. I just chalk up the 1 - 2 times a year I need to call for help as a cost of living here. It can get rather pricey (this year's was pretty high compared to previous ones), but considering it was expedited and they had been plowing since 5 am (with another 10 houses to go), I'm not complaining one bit. 

P.S. I really was tempted to title this blog post, "Getting Plowed - 14 inches of the good stuff", but I figure I already get enough Web traffic looking for weird content than I need.