(no subject)

[which_chick]

Today we went to the eye doctor. The snow was coming down hard when I left at 6:30 AM but there was not enough on the road to plow and it was still snowing so I did not plow before leaving.



I was driving the Audi, which has phenomenally low ground clearance but which is the only car that Grandma really likes getting into and out of. Because grandma is ninety-four and can barely walk, she gets to say which car she wants to ride to the eye doctor in. She likes the Audi. I do not like driving the Audi (see low ground clearance, also it's really jabby on the accellerator) but that doesn't really matter.

The snow continued falling thick and fast as we forged our way eastward to the eye doctor in Camphill. The westbound part of the Turnpike was closed from McConnellsburg to Carlisle -- a semi truck had flipped over on its side and taken out several panels of concrete median barrier -- but we were headed east so that was okay. There were many blinking lights on the assorted emergency vehicles at the dead semi truck wreck site, though, and they looked good in the snow but I did not have my camera.

At the eye doctors, there was a nearly-empty waiting room (the retina people see rather a lot of elderly patients who don't much fancy schlepping to the eye doctor when four inches of snow are on the ground). We got through eye-doctoring in record time. We headed back home on the westbound pike, which was not closed anymore. The snow had stopped and the pike was down to bare pavement, so I cranked the car up to sixty-five and made pretty good time.

I dropped grandma off at Heather's. I drove the Audi homeward. I gunned the Audi through the plow roll at the junction of the driveway and 30. It went kind of crunchy, but that's what plow rolls do when you bull through them. There were black plastic bits in my wake, which, thinking back, I should have paid more attention to... but honestly, it was too late. Everybody (and that would include the owner of the Audi) bulls through the plow roll where the road hits 30. This wasn't a driver-error on my part. I made it about halfway up the hill to the underpass before the car came to a halt. It was driving funny and refusing to go forward. I backed the car up to take another run at the hill. There was a pile of snow in front of my car, as if the car was snowplowing or something. Weird. I took another run at the hill, made it further up, about three quarters of the way to the underpass. I backed up again, observed the same weird pile of snow thing, took another go at it, and made it to the underpass. Yay me! (There is still some tread left on the tires. I checked.) Underneath the underpass, there was no snow. It was a good place to stop and investigate whatever the hell was wrong with the car that it was plowing snow in front of it.

I got out of the car and spent some quality time in the twenty-two degree air inspecting the snow-covered undercarriage of the Audi. The Audi apparently has some kind of sorry-ass undercarriage bra made out of semi-flexible black plastic. This sorry-ass undercarriage bra (Not visible to anyone looking at the car from higher than dachshund-point-of-view) had come loose at the front and was sort of scooping the snow up underneath the car. Fucking german engineering. The loose undercarriage bra thing would be why the car was driving funny and piling snow up in front of itself.

Bugger. It is two miles from the underpass to the lodge. From the underpassly direction, it's downhill... but even so, I didn't figure I could get the Audi down the road. Fortunately for me, there is conveniently-located telephone line that goes very directly and precipitously down (and I mean that in a sense that includes more verticality than you probably think) the hill to the lodge in LESS THAN TWO MILES and in what would be an As The Crow Flies straight line if I were a crow instead of a poor bastard on foot.

I parked the Audi at the top of the road. I walked slid-and-fell down the telephone line to Sandra's house. I walked around the corner and across the football field to the lodge where the snowplow was slumbering quietly in its cave (next to the dozer cave). I was happy that I'd worn my big, clunky, blue-felt-lined boots to take grandma to the eye doctor. I was happy that I'd packed the ugly green hat and an extra layer of flannel quilty in the car just in case of this eventuality. I was sort of pissed that I'd forgotten my gloves at Heather's, though, particularly after I fell for the third time. My hip is bruised. (I'm saying 'hip' but really it's the thigh just under where the crease for your ass is. That part there. It's bruised.)

I fired up the plow and plowed the road. I did down to dad's and around the lodge once and up past my house. I did not do the other side of the lake. It's midweek. It's going to be fifty and raining by the weekend. I plowed out to 30 and fixed the plow roll problem there. En route to the top of the road, I managed to bounce the plow hard enough to break one of the plow headlights. (Sorry!) I picked up the pieces so that I wouldn't drive over them a million times and kill every tire I own. *sigh* I wish that I could please just once have a plowing that didn't also involve me breaking something like a damn fool.

I put the snowplow away. I shoveled out my driveway. I built a fire. I called Howie to drive me back up the road to get the stupid Audi with its stupid poorly-engineered busted undercarriage bra. I put the Audi (which was fine to drive as soon as I wasn't trying to drive it through four inches of snow) at the lodge. Now, I need to do something about the busted undercarriage bra before April 17, when I have to drive grandma to her next eye appointment.

Dinner: Corned beef (I splurged) and cabbage and potatoes.

Comments

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

If the undercarriage bra is anything like the one on Ivy's Ford, which came loose a week or so ago so that I had to crawl around in the snow to look at it, then it clips onto the front bumper and repairs in a few minutes with no tools.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Well, it might have before it left black plastic bits behind it after it went through the plow roll from 30. I'll take another look when the weather heats up, but I'm almost entirely certain that about half of it is missing.

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

Ivy's undercarriage shield clips on the sides as well as the front, which I found to be both useful and annoying, and which you may find means that there's still some functional connectors. Presumably an Audi is reverse engineered from UFOs or something, so the plastic has already healed itself through the agency of nanotechnology.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Been watching BSG again, then?

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

Reading Cordwainer Smith, actually.

[moeckie.livejournal.com]

"plow roll"! *That's* what it's called (and what I got the Jimmy stuck on last week while trying to get in our driveway!) I kept referring to it as "a bump of snow that the plow left at the base of our driveway." Plow roll is somehow much more satisfying.

Then of course there's the other time I got stuck on Monday when I snow-blowed the drive (no plow here, yet) and didn't do the place in the drive where I back up, and so promptly got stuck when I backed up to leave for work. My mad snow skillz are developing, so it took me 45 minutes to figure that out - the how to get unstuck when your tire has spun down to the frozen earth and made a mud popsicle. I don't have anyone here to call when the man's gone (the man with the mad snow skillz and professional driving experience) so had to figure it out. My first idea was to leave the &#^@# thing til that 50 degrees came. I had to go to work, though.

I am learning to power skid, though. That's fun.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's an official term. I just... you know how ocean waves break and the top falls over the bottom in a circle-y sort of way? That's what it looks like when snow is coming off of a plow, at least when there's a good layer of snow on the road and the plow is making decent time. It's a very rotary affair, plowing is. Plow roll suits and most people understand what I mean when I say it. You might ask around and see if other people use a different word for the stuff. (And possibly there are people who live where it does not snow or who do not get their driveways plowed shut by the local DoT. Those people would not need a word for "bump of snow left by the plow across the end of your driveway")

[moeckie.livejournal.com]

No, I like plow roll. I used it in conversation today with someone who understood it immediately, so it could be a common usage term. If it isn't, it's at least a term people can understand right away, and much better than "bump of snow etc".

So far our driveway hasn't been plowed shut, but at the moment it's a very close thing. It's about a 45 degree roll, about a foot tall. I can escape and get back in, but it's a near thing. That lovely man is planning on some serious snowblowing today before he leaves on his next run, bless him.

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

And possibly there are people who live where it does not snow or who do not get their driveways plowed shut by the local DoT. Those people would not need a word for "bump of snow left by the plow across the end of your driveway"

People who live in lands where there are no plow rolls have one hundred words for "sunshine." If they ever touch an Eskimo, they explode in a burst of hard gamma radiation.