Blizzard, 2011, part 2

“Success is determined by those whom prove the impossible, possible.” - James W. Pence

With more than 14 inches of snow, and massive snowdrifts, "impossible" would be what Jeff and I saw and thought when we opened our garage door this morning and saw what had become of our driveway:

 I would estimate that we had a good three foot drift in front of the entire drive, about 10 feet down, across all three stalls. In addition to that, the City plows dumped at least 5 feet of ice-packed snow across 1 1/2 of our driveway...needless to say, after an hour of digging we were feeling pretty helpless.  The kids LOVED the natural sled hill, however. 

After standing in the drive just muttering to myself, I decided to go in an call in reinforcements (the kind that drive big trucks with plows on them). I was feeling desperate and was willing to pay for someone else to dig us out.  After having no success finding anyone I came back out to find several of our neighbors helping Jeff...we have awesome neighbors.  Truly, I will be so sad to move from this house (if it ever sells) because we do have the best neighbors in the world.  So, six of us with two snow blowers got to work trying to break through, even enough to get one car out.  Eventually, we were all feeling defeated and Jeff, after spotting a snow removal truck on the next street took off to ask him to come by our house.  It took him awhile to trek through all the snow, but he managed to catch him...first success of the day!!

Unfortunately, the guy told Jeff there was no way he was going to tackle our mess--his truck would get stuck, he said.  So, without anything else to do we kept shoveling.  Eventually, the guy with the truck rounded the corner and we all started jumping up and down, waving at him...maybe he made a mistake and he could do it after all?!  Truly, we had to be a sight--six grown adults standing next to snow up to our shoulders, waving down snowplows...

The guy obviously felt bad for us, but once again affirmed that he couldn't do a job that big.  He told us we could wait until tomorrow when a front loader could come...and then, we must have looked pathetic enough that he agreed to take a few passes at the end of the drive to, as he said, "give us a little hope"...

His little bit of "hope" wasn't all that much, unfortunately.  An hour later we finally cleared enough snow to get the cars out. On the bright side, I think this counts for both my cardio and strength workouts today!