Today’s post comes from Ben.
I took the header photo last week before the snow. Daughter, dogs, and I took a ride in the gator and stopped for this photo. The dogs run halfway, then we load them in the back, and they ride the rest of the way home. Humphrey is not a jumper; I need to find a snow drift or bank so he can get in there.
The news this week is all about the snowstorm.
I spent some time getting things ready: put the gator in the shed, filled the tractor with diesel fuel, made sure the chickens had plenty of food and water. And filled the corn feeder and wall feeder so I wouldn’t have to do it during the snow. At one of the theaters, I hauled out garbage because I knew it would be easier before the snow than after.
An East wind snowstorm is always a problem. There were some deep drifts.
I didn’t hook the blower up at first because I wondered how bad it would really be. It didn’t take many steps to decide I needed the blower– there was no way I could have done it with the blade. Took a few hours, but got it done. Same as the rest of you, different equipment but we’ve all moved snow before.
The guy who drives the road grader for the county, and plows roads for our township, is on a beach in the Dominican Republic this week. Not a bad deal for him. The guy who drives the big county truck with a wing blade on each side to plow roads, he retired a month ago. Kudos to all those truck drivers filling in and keeping the roads clear.
I’ve spent a few days working on lights for a show this week. I’m climbing ladders again! Left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg… just like the old days! It’s pretty cool. Honestly, I feel 20 years younger! And fun to be back in the saddle so to speak. Also redoing some storage rooms and an assortment of odd jobs around the theater. Busy busy busy.
I’m trying to get book work done. I meet my accountant for taxes on March 17th. Twenty years ago, I was always behind on book work, too. The snow days were good for getting book work done.
I go to a business and there’s this pillar that isn’t square to the room. I hate it.
It’s square to the entire building, but not the lobby. It makes me crazy.
One other thing I did last week was move the tank that we use to raise the baby chicks. It normally sits behind the chicken coop, and it can get buried in snow. Last week it was out of the snow and I moved it to a trailer so when I need it this spring, it won’t be frozen down and buried.
If I’m thinking baby chicks, spring must be coming.
WERE WINTERS REALLY WORSE WHEN YOU WERE A KID?
HOW DID YOU GET TO SCHOOL?
Trail Baboon 
Looking at the piles of snow in my yard makes me remember when I was a kid how we used to climb up and slide down the piles by our houses. They served as “big hills.” Always walked to school, kindergarten to graduation. In grade school I had to walk up a steep hill but could slide down. The path was next to what was used for kids (boys as I recall) to practice skiing. I remember stomping through the melting ice on the gutters in March. For fun.
Cynthia “Life is a shifting carpet…learn to dance.”
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are used to love selling popsicle sticks under the ice in the gutters as spring started to warm things up by grade school in first grade before being allowed to enter Catholic school was a public school that was basically three blocks of downhill, suburban gutters that emptied out into the school parking lot used to have grape popsicle, stick races they would disappear and come out, crushing the powers of driveways intersecting with the streets
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I think winters were, on the whole, snowier when I was a kid than they are now. Old photos from my childhood show mountains of snow in front of the house. Of course the mountains of snow were probably the reason for the photo. We didn’t take photos profligately then. This year is an anomaly but for the last few winters I haven’t needed to get out the snow blower at all. This winter twice so far.
I always lived too far from school to walk. Even for kindergarten, which I started before I was five, and which was further away than any of my other schools I took a bus along with the other five-year-olds. It’s hard for me to imagine sending my grandson who is five off alone on a bus.
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Because Joel went to a Waldorf School the first two years, I had to send him on a bus when he was five. It was excruciating at first, but he did enjoy bringing home tidbits like: “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat…” Anyone know the rest of it?? : )
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There’s more?
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The second half (of this version, anyway) goes: …”If you don’t, I don’t care, I’ll pull down your underwear.”
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I agree about the pillar. They should have built a shell around it.
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Yep. Preformed half-moons to make a column. A larger circular capitol for extra drama.
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I walked to all four of my grade schools, through 6th grade. In kindergarten I started out on East Milwaukee, an unpaved road in Storm Lake, and in a block or so was joined by friend Suzanne, for a couple more blocks. We were always just a few blocks from these schools, and I have pleasant memories of stepping on crunching leaves in the fall, playing tag or something on the way with others, exploring a downed tree…
Wish all kids had the experience.
The snow hills would have been on the schoolgrounds, and I do remember playing on them at recess with Marjorie W, Russian spy game we’d made up.
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I always drove to elementary school with my mother, since she was a Grade 3 teacher. In Junior High and High School I walked, since we were only a few blocks from school. If I had my bass clarinet to haul my dad would give me a ride.
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Ugh, I do remember having to tote my cello back and forth once a week when I was in sixth grade… just a couple of blocks, but I didn’t like that.
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I walked a block to elementary school. Public bus to secondary. Drove my car to high school.
Winters were worse in the 60’s.
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I remember there were some pretty bad winters in the ‘70s. I think there was a particularly bad winter in 1979 or ‘80. I can’t remember precisely but I lived with a friend in a small place out by Nerstrand and the gravel road we were on wasn’t cleared for several days. There were no more visible road signs after it was finally plowed – they were buried. It was like driving between two walls. I don’t remember seeing anything like it since. It was in open country and the road ran north and south. The wind blew from the northwest so it filled the road in.
I walked to elementary school in Owatonna. We lived three or four blocks east of Roosevelt Elementary. When I was a little kid, there was open space across South Grove Avenue from our house. Four blocks were joined together as one huge block. There were homes around the perimeter but behind them all was a large open space. (For those familiar with Owatonna, that large space is now Richard Place and Margaret Place.) As kids, we played back there a lot. There were interesting fallen trees and a path which cut diagonally through the space and shortened the walk to school. There was a hill on the south end of the space which got icy in the winter. I remember falling back there more than once. We used it for a sledding hill too and that made it icier.
After we moved out to Cannon Lake, I rode the bus to school. That was an entirely different experience for me and a whole story in itself.
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You lucky kids, to have that 4-block space like that… something like when we were in married student housing, the “strips” of apartments were arranged around a large open playground space.
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I was pretty lucky to have quite a bit of open space for roaming and exploring. We always had the place at the lake and we all loved it there. We moved there permanently when I was 12. Swimming, bike riding, walking, building forts, unicycle riding! And I had horses too!
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I was in a similar environment until I was twelve, minus the unicycle and horses.
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I remember a terrible December snow storm when I was in Grade 12 where the snow was red because it blew in from western North Dakota.
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My four older siblings went to a one room school about 2 miles
From our house. Course the first mile+ is just getting to the end of our driveway.
There are stories when the weather was bad, or the road was drifted, that dad loaded everyone in the manure spreader, and drove them to the highway with a tractor, where he flagged down somebody passing by to drop them off at the school. I don’t know if they ever walked. And then once they started seventh grade in middle school, I assume they had buses.
I am the only one that didn’t actually attend the one room school, I went to the elementary school in town. I would almost always get a ride to the bus that picked me up at the end of our driveway, but I walked home from that spot many days. Some days I rode a bicycle up or took the snowmobile and some days I would get a ride home. Some days I walked Several blocks to grandmas house. Rode the school bus to middle school and maybe 10th grade, but then started driving in about 11th grade.
I know we have pictures of bigger snow drifts along our road, and I think it’s a combination of the machinery being smaller so It didn’t throw the snow as far and it piled up more, or maybe there were less trees, so there was more wind, so It drifted more.
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My sense is that we had more snow in Denmark when I was a little kid than we did when I was a teen. Of course, I wasn’t in the same place, and perhaps that was a factor?
Having lived in so many different places, I don’t really feel qualified to comment on the colder winter question. I am convinced, however, that something is going on with climate change all over the globe, and I’m afraid it isn’t good news.
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I have always either walked or ridden my bike to school. School buses were an unknown phenomenon in Denmark at that time. Actually, I have no idea whether or not they have materialized in the interim.
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We lived out in the country during my early school years. The school bus driver who took us to school was a guy named Einer Anderson, but we were invited to call him Andy. There was a pretty steep hill that had to be navigated to get to our road, so if the weather was bad, one of the enighbors who had a four-wheel-drive Jeep would pick up the neighborhood kids and drive us up to the county road to meet the bus.
Later we lived in town and I had a pretty long walk to junior high and high school. I didn’t mind snow, but I remember some pretty cold days, and it was hard to arrive at school chilled to the bone and then try to be attentive in class.
There was a bad storm in January ’75 – I think we had a snow day then.
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Love that first photo from the tractor (or whatever) – the way the blowing snow interacts with the sky…
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I grew up riding the bus to Catholic school until I was in seventh grade one I switched to junior high school which was walking distance except for the really really cold day as it was about a mile and a half or 2 miles, but the walk was never a problem I could always get a ride with friends one of my friends had a drivers license in junior high because there’s a kid he had a garbage truck tipped over on him that basically put him in bed for two years where he couldn’t walk and he reenter the school system to years later so he had his drivers license in ninth grade, and he was my friend in seventh grade and I was able to get rides to and from school almost every day one day when he wasn’t able to give us a ride we had to take the bus on a super cold day, we had been smoking cigarettes, waiting for the bus to come, and when the bus came because I wasn’t expecting it as not being a regular rider I kept the cigarette in my hand and put it in my coat pocket to take it on the bus and finish the cigarette in the back of the bus. Unfortunately, I started the inside of my coat pocket on fire without being aware of it and by the time the bus stopped, and we got off , it was smoldering into a larger, expanding donut hole where my pocket had once been for high school I had the VW bash for all of my high school years
I know that the seasons are changing by the fact that we now have possum and grubs that didn’t exist in Minnesota when I was a kid they were further south in like Kansas City and Omaha but I still think of that cartoon or the dad saying no the winters were much worse when I was a kid the snow is up to my shoulders, and standing next to him, is his kid with the snow up to his shoulders I remember being sent out to the playground every day for an hour even when it was 20 below wild because the nuns needed a break. I don’t think they do that anymore. It’s kind of turned into a deal where they compensate for the parents not being smart enough to send Coach long to school with the kids and assume that the kids would freeze to death being sent outside or even waiting for the bus so they cancel school , I love winter and found out by spending one year in California and the south west that I don’t want to live someplace where they don’t have all four seasons that’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy visiting Florida Arizona or someplace warm for an extended stay during the winter in the years to come, but I’ve got my work cut out for me in order to get to that place
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So did you ditch the smoldering coat before you got home, or what??
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no i liked the coat
i just used the other pocket
the burn hole was the size of a tennis ball
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OMG, tim, do you ever sleep? I have great admiration for your mother. How she made it through your childhood and youth, is beyond me.
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I grew up in a state farther south from here, so no winters weren’t worse. Just different. And I walked to school up until i got into high school with the exception of the first half of first grade. I did take the bus then, but then I was getting bullied at school, which I don’t remember, and my parents pulled me out, and we moved.
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