When I talked about fun things to do in the winter to keep your brain happy, I mentioned, somewhat sarcastically, shoveling all of the snow in existence. I don’t know if someone out there took me at my word or what, but I came home from work last week to find this in our backyard:
Ladies and gentlemen, that is an 8 foot mountain of snow nonchalantly dropped in our backyard, as if it was a vacant lot! And not just snow, but snow and garbage!
My first thought, obviously, was that the city did this. They have been doing their darndest to keep the streets cleaned, and there are supposed to be official places to dump the excess snow: Parks, parking lots, vacant lots. On Wednesday, they plowed our street. So naturally, I imagined some numbskull thought he could get away with taking a shortcut and dumping everything in our yard.
If we owned a huge property, this wouldn’t matter. Heck, I regularly shrug off having to shovel the sidewalks once the plowdrivers inevitably ruin my beautiful sidewalk work. But we only have a 25×100 foot lot! And with extensive patio work planned for this spring, I can’t sacrifice this huge plot of land to Snow Mountain! We all know what’s going to happen. This would melt and re-freeze and not disappear until July!
What the fuuuuck!
If you see a mountain, climb it. Pose by Norm, illustration by Marge
Anyway, the city claims it wasn’t their workers that did it because they don’t bring large trucks down our alley. I don’t know if I’m inclined to believe them or not, but if the city didn’t put it there, who did? Some private contractor idiot looking to unload snow from his paying customers’ lots? Is this a threat? Is someone going to show up at the door saying, “Say, that’s a lot of snow ya got back there. I’ll move it for a hundred bucks!”
In a heartening show of empathy, our mayor took an interest in this snow dumping and sent people on two separate days to check it out. Code enforcement took photos of the tire tracks in the hopes of matching them up to a truck. I don’t expect anything to come of it, but I can at least say that we wouldn’t get that kind of attention in the larger cities here like Albany, Troy, or Schenectady. I love my city, and as cheesy as their slogan is, Cohoes actually is a “community that cares.”
I the meantime, there was work to be done. I knew that the snow had to go, so Marge and I got to work destroying the mountain, bit by bit, by hand with whatever tools we could find!
The snow was definitely dumped into place, but what’s annoying, aside from the parts that were completely ice, is that the snow was starting to compact. It was dense enough that we couldn’t use normal snow shovels. We had to use metal shovels to cut it into chunks, which we then chucked into the alley.
After three hours of back-breaking digging, we took about 3-4 feet off the top of the mountain. The city told us they “might” be able to get someone to help us. That didn’t happen. But when they’re ready and take a truck down here, there will be a bunch of snow waiting for them in the alley…
Compare to the first picture to see the progress.
When I said I wanted to shovel all of the snow in existence, I was joking!!!
Addendum: A few days later, the garbage truck came down the alley and got stuck for a few minutes in the pile we made. The garbage guys looked just as confused as I was about the mystery pile.