Is Winter nearly over yet?

After a particularly severe Winter, I finally got the workshop door open today. I had to pry it and wedge it and finally I freed it from its three-month-long ice lock.  Now I can let the daylight in and really see how much of a problem the flooding is on the floor! Yes, the recent slight thaw seems to have caused some run off to find its way into the workshop where it pooled in the middle of the floor. Then it refroze. Fantastic! I don’t think the two rear tires of the Corvette and the rhs rear tire of the DeLorean particularly appreciate this development. There is little I can do. It is only about 1 degree today so I will not try to start the cars. There is not much point anyway and I would prefer for the ice to be melted around the tires before I try to move the cars. Tomorrow is to be warmer. Maybe I will try then. Regardless, there is still no way I can get the cars out for a drive. The snow is still almost as deep as the height of my boots, which I would guess is about 10 or 12 inches deep in some areas. And of course now that the snow/ice is receding out in the gardens, I can see the fallen tree limbs and branches that have been lying on the ground encased in ice since the ice storm that happened before Christmas. There is still too much ice keeping them glued to the ground to try to move them. Perhaps next week. Up at the front of the driveway, I was able to see yesterday for the first time just how much tree limbs came down in December. On both sides of the entranceway there is a mass of small branches and limbs all jumbled together. They look like huge, huge giant bird nests. I guess I will be having a few bonfires this year out in the back!

Finally some light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.  About time too.  It’s almost April!

Into the unknown – Canada and Ireland and me.

In a few hours it will be Friday March 28^th 2014.   March 28^th was a Tuesday in 1989.  It was the Tuesday after Easter, 25 years ago.  Easter Tuesday. How do I know?  Because that was the day I left Ireland and moved to Canada.   Good gawd!  March 28^th 1989.  I remember that day well. It was a very sad day to leave the people that were important to me, and a scary day to venture off alone into the unknown. Has it really been 25 years?   It feels like 8 or 10 years. This is huge.

I have worked for more years in Canada than in Ireland.

I have voted in more elections in Canada than in Ireland.

I have been driving 2½ times longer in left hand drive cars in Canada than in right hand drive cars in Ireland. So why does my left hand still occasionally shoot out to change gear?

In the first 12 years in Canada, I visited Ireland 10 times.

It’s been over 13 years since I was last in Ireland.

25 years. 25 years!!

I have had more Canadian passports than Irish.

I could go on and on, but right now I am just shocked to realize that it has been 25 years.

It’s hard to believe.  Amazing!

School Buses

I know I’ll get into trouble for this one, but before the parents of school going children decide to attack me, chill out, digest my points, and then see if you even partly agree with me. I suspect most drivers will agree with me. Most people I have talked to about this issue kinda shrugged their shoulders and admitted that I had a valid point.

I’m not a fan of school buses. Actually I have very little time for them at all.  There I said it.  Really.  I think they are unnecessary.  They hold up traffic.  They lead to road rage.  They are one of the worst pollution generating machines you are likely to see on the roads; puking out black smoke in abundance.  By the way that black smoke is mostly inhaled by the kids that have just disembarked from the bus.  They inhale it as the bus accelerates to drive away.

For the most part, school buses serve no good purpose.  For the most part.

Perhaps most of all, they are doing nothing for children’s chances of learning to account for themselves.  It doesn’t help that the drivers of a lot of school buses seem to have little or no knowledge of the basic rules of driving.  How did some of these people even get their driving license?  I mean is it really THAT difficult to turn on your indicator before making a turn in a bus filled with society’s most precious cargo?  Some school bus drivers seem to think that just because they are driving a vehicle larger than most cars on the road that they can bully and push their way around with little regard for the havoc that they may be leaving in their wake.  Is it acceptable for a school bus driver to activate the red flashing lights as the bus approaches you from the opposite direction, and then cruise pass you when you have stopped like an idiot as the law states, and finally the bus stops about 20 car lengths past you?  At that stage what is the point in you being stopped at all?   That in turn begs the question what the hell was the driver thinking by activating his red lights so much earlier that necessary and so much earlier than allowed by law?

Picture this scene.  A two lane roadway.  I mean two lanes in each direction.  At an intersection, there is an additional left turn lane and a right turn lane.  So now we have 4 lanes in both directions.  Now picture a school bus stopped in the right turn lane with its red lights flashing thereby halting all moving traffic while it off loads children.  The driver decides at the end of disembarkation to keep the lights flashing while he drives across the intersection.   Let me describe that.  With the red lights effectively keeping everyone in a stationary position, the bus makes a left hand turn across all lanes of traffic to complete his left turn across the intersection.  In other words EIGHT lanes of traffic were void of any vehicular movement because of the fear of the dreaded red flashing school bus lights and all because the school bus driver wanted to break the law and drive cross-ways through an intersection of stopped traffic.  Whaaaat?  I was there.  I saw it happening. I was one of the many, many stopped vehicles.  And apparently such law breaking is acceptable?  Or else the cops turn a blind eye – I am not sure which is true.  Why are school buses allowed to behave as if they are above the law?   Given the value of their passengers should we not hold these drivers to a higher standard?

Actually, why do we have school buses in the first place?  Aside from young little kids who have yet to learn concepts and the dangers of moving traffic, would it not be better to teach the children how to cross a road and conduct themselves safely and responsibly when around moving traffic?  Instead we have to stop our cars while a spoiled 16 or 17 year old brat walks as slowly as he possibly can from the school bus across the road taking his time, stopping to reposition his bag over his shoulder, stopping to turn around and see if his friend is getting off the bus too, then stopping to fix his shoe, dragging out the process of crossing the road as long as he can while he sneers at the helpless drivers who are chewing sections out of their the steering wheel in frustration because the law dictates that his inability to cross the road using his own discretion is more important than other drivers’ time or the time of all of commerce and society in the general vicinity.  After all, the whole world has to wait for this lazy arrogant worthless piece of garbage to move his ass.   The poor little darling does not yet know how to cross the road on his own so we provide a red flashing light on a school bus for him. We are teaching him that the whole world in general will wait for him to move.  Yeah, like that is helpful.  He already thinks that he is the center of the universe and that we have to kiss his ass as if he is superior to us.  Society says that he cannot cross the road by himself because it is too dangerous.  But yet he can drive his parents’ car legally!  Are you serious?  Who came up with that brilliant idea? How can he drive a car if he can’t cross the road by himself?   In my opinion the whole role of school buses and their “need” in our world should to be examined and changed.  It has become ridiculous.

It’s raining….INSIDE!

What’s the tap-tap-tapping sound?  It almost sounds like a dripping sound.  Why are the fish making that noise?  I better go over there and check on them to see why they are making that sound.  Hmmm.  They are fine.  Hold on, the sound is not coming from the fish at all.  It’s coming from the window.  Whaat?  Water is pouring from the top of the window frame onto the window sill below, then onto the bottom of the frame, then down the wall and on to the carpet.  The carpet.  Look at it.  It’s soaked.  What the hell is going on?    It’s like rain.  It’s raining inside the house!   There are no pipes above the area.  What’s going on?  Oh no.  It’s the buildup of snow/ice on the roof.  How the hell is it getting inside?  I went outside to look.   I had to trudge through snow deep enough to be up to my hips to get a look at the roof.  The snow/ice is about 10 inches thick.  I can’t even see any of the roof itself to determine what is wrong.  Well obviously the ice has started to melt as the temperature is above zero for the first time in months, so it must be somehow getting in through the roof.

I went to the computer.  Hello Operator?  Get me Google.com please.  OK according to the Internet, this is apparently not such a strange occurrence.  When ice builds up on a roof during the Winter, and then the temperatures rise in late Winter/early Spring, some of it turns to water that cannot drain away because of the remaining ice that is blocking it.  So what does it do?  Well in this case, it decorated inside the house by raining in there!  Wonderful.  All I can do is strategically position some garbage bags onto the glass and try to deflect the water away from the wall and into a rain barrel which I dragged in from its Winter storage home in the gazebo outside.  It will hold the water and I will empty it when needed.  And I will have to lift the carpet and get some fans to blow it dry.  I will have to follow that routine for the next few weeks I guess, until the ice melts and then I will have to deal with the roof if there is any damage to it.  There is a good chance that the roof will be unharmed when all is said and done, as this is really being caused by excess ice and not by a defect in the roof.  The room is a mess now with garbage bags taped onto the window and funnelled into the barrel.  Looks ridiculous, but it works.  What else can I do?  I have a fan blowing on the carpet and I’ll leave it there for another day or so before deciding if I need to lift the carpet or not.

I need this Winter to end soon!

The Seasons

Weather can be severe in Torawno and its surrounding area.  Unlike the rest of the world, there are two very distinct seasons.  Some people make light of the seasons by saying that there is the Winter season and there is the Construction season.  This is not amusing.  This merely goes to show how ill-informed some people really are.  The seasons of course are the Summer season, and Snow On The Driver’s Seat season. Summer is nice and sunny and warm as you might imagine.  Snow On Your Driver’s Seat season is cold and snowy.  Snow On Your Driver’s Seat is most noticeable on cold mornings when it is minus millions of degrees and the wind is howling and the sun has not yet woken up. You go out to your car in the dark, in order to make your way to work.  You open the door and hey presto, what do you have?  Yes indeedy:   Snow On Your Driver’s Seat.   This is a not uncommon phenomenon.  It happens EVERY time you open the frickin door in the Winter. It matters not how well you brush the snow off the outside of the door prior to opening it.  It matters not how slowly or how quickly you open the door.  It matters not how much new snow may be falling at the time of opening the door.  It matters not how much or how little snow has fallen in the last 8 to 10 hours.  It is actually a mystery as to how and why it ALWAYS happens.  Physicists and Theorists have debated this strange phenomenon for many generations. Lab experiments have been conducted to recreate the conditions necessary for this occurrence to occur, and boy oh boy, does it ever occur. It occurs in abundance. And of course, when it occurs in real life on one of those afore mentioned mornings, there is little one can do to correct the situation aside from brushing the snow off your seat with your hand.  This often futile exercise results in you merely spreading the offending snow over more of the seat while simultaneously semi-melting it very effectively into the fabric of the seat.  The result looks not unlike a slice of bread smothered with peanut butter. Then you sit your little heinie down onto the peanut butter and get yourself all nice and yucky for the 50 minute drive to work.  Nice.  This leads to two questions.  Firstly, where is the vacuum?  Where is the vacuum that sucks the snow mysteriously into the car and deposits it onto the driver’s seat before you get the door fully open enough to enter the vehicle?  How does it suck in all that snow and position it all over the seat so successfully every time? EVERY TIME!!!   Why is it that this snow never ever, ever ends up on the floor of the car?  Why does it never end up on the passenger seat?  Why does it never end up on the dashboard?  Why does it never end up anywhere else but the driver’s seat?  The driver’s seat is the necessary-ist seat in the whole goddamned car and the snow just HAS to end up there.  Why?  I have searched all over my car looking for this snow-sucking vacuum but I can’t find it anywhere.  I assumed it was built into the seat my some minions in General Motors who were in partnership with Levi’s or some other maker of pants so that you and I the poor sucker who gets peanut butter-like snow all over his pants at 6am on a cold morning, would have to run out as the earliest moment and purchase a new pair of pants to replace the wet ones that the car seat assaulted!  But, there is no trace of a vacuum anywhere in, on or around the seat.   So, I ask you: WTF?????   Secondly, how do you explain peanut butter all over the seat of your pants to your coworkers???

I fear I may never find out the reasons why snow ends up on the driver’s seat so effectively.

A wheel? Seriously.

So there I was on a bitterly cold windy day plowing snow in the driveway.  It was minus 24 degrees according to the car’s onboard thermometer when I drove home about 15 minutes earlier, and that is not accounting for the wind which probably made it feel like 8 or 10 degrees colder.  This damned wind has blown so much snow over the driveway that it looks like we have had a seriously heavy snow fall even though we have had no new snow for days.  The truck fired up effortlessly.  For an old rusty pickup truck, it really is a terrific help.  A snowblade on the front and I am inside the cab driving, away from the elements when clearing the snow.  It used to take up to 2 hours with a snow blower until I decided to get the truck a few years ago.  2 hours of working a machine outside in the wind and snow and cold.  Now I am inside a warm truck having fun!  I did a run from the house all the way up to the road.  Backed up and did another run slightly to the left of the last one.  Then another, then another.  I was left with a small mound of snow at the end of the driveway.  I had to drive through it out onto the road in order to push the snow off to one side of the entrance.  As I drove out onto the road, there was a loud, heavy kuh-lunk sound!  What the hell was that?  I drove about 3 or 4 feet and I looked in the mirror.  There was a wheel on the ground in the middle of the entranceway.  A wheel!  What the hell?  Am I now on three wheels? Am I mysteriously balancing on three?  If I lean over will the truck tip up on one side?  What is going on?   I leaned from side to side.  No tipping happening here!  I opened the door looked at the front and back wheels on the driver’s side.  All intact.  I hopped out and walked back to the wheel on the ground.  It was the spare tire!!!!!   It is usually bolted onto the underside of the truck.  There it was lying on the ground.  Well it IS an old rusty truck.  I picked up the wheel and heaved it into the back of the truck.  Wow pickup truck wheels are pretty heavy.  Wasn’t expecting that. I jumped back into the warm truck and continued my snow clearing task.  I never expected to lose a wheel like that.  I smiled to myself as I thought back to how I actually entertained the possibility of being on three wheels.  How dumb!