I finished my draft on Friday, then I got my car shoveled out yesterday, so that’s been my recent accomplishment. I am now allowing myself to rest a bit and do thinking type work. Getting through all that ice was a real challenge.

This is what my car looked like before I was able to dig it out.

And this was the end of my driveway Monday, after I’d been shoveling at it for days. I was using a garden hoe to hack the ice into blocks. And then my neighbor brought over a tool he’d been using. It’s designed for breaking up tile flooring, and it works amazingly on ice. There’s a narrow blade on the bottom and it’s heavy. You just let it drop onto the surface, and it shatters it. I went from clearing maybe a foot or two a day to getting the rest of the driveway and my car freed on Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I finished a good path to my driveway and cleared space around the car so I could get to the door and open it, plus cleared a path to the mailbox and freed the trash bin. It was easier work with this tool, but still tiring because you have to keep lifting this heavy thing, and you still have to move all the blocks of ice. That’s why I’m resting today.

This is just part of the piles of ice blocks I moved from my driveway. I’ll have to track to see how long it takes to melt. We actually got above freezing yesterday, and that actually made it a bit harder to move more ice because when it got slushy, the tool no longer worked and I couldn’t just move chunks at a time. I had to actually shovel.

After a day of rest, I may do a little more work on paths. The path I dug from the porch to the driveway doesn’t follow the actual walkway (I’ve been thinking of moving the walkway, which is stepping stones, and this path might be a good option because it’s what made sense at the time, especially because the snow/ice drifted deeper on the real path). I may try to dig out the walkway. And I may move some of the slush from my deck so it doesn’t melt and flow toward my basement. Plus, this is a great workout and I’d like to maintain and maybe even build on some of the fitness I’ve developed from doing all this, so I need to keep working instead of just sitting now.

Once I freed my car, I was able to restock on groceries and run by the library. The city streets are somewhat cleared, but side streets are mostly one-lane. They had crews out loading chunks of ice into dump trucks because clearing the streets had created walls of ice around the town. I don’t know when all of this will melt.