My property isn't big enough to have enough concrete to warrant a snow blower, so I do it the old-fashioned way.

We've recently been treated with a good dose of snow. Knee deep in spots and definitely over the tops of your shoes in the low spots; usually hanging around mid-shin. The snow's light and fluffy, so shoveling is just a matter of repetition. A chore of scooping the snow from the places you don't want it, and tossing it to places where you don't mind it. I don't really want a five-foot mound of snow on my lawn (turns to mud in the spring), but I can't throw it on the street.

The city, however, doesn't share my philosophy and frequently plows the snow from the street right onto my freshly shoveled sidewalk, or from the center of the alley across my "driveway" (which is little more than the 8-foot wide apron in front of my garage).

Here's where a bit of "fairness" falls apart. The street is a good twenty feet wide. Generally half goes one way, and half goes the other way. The boulevard between my sidewalk and the curb is about a foot deep, and my sidewalk is about three feet wide. It would seem that the show plow would make a wider wash across this, and actually hit my lawn with snow from the street. In fact, and I know anyone who's lived in winterland knows about this, the plows are designed to scoop the snow into a much thinner, but deeper pile, trying to keep as much as possible on the boulevard. This doesn't work since my urban boulevard is so narrow, and invariably, half of my sidewalk is encrusted with the much more dense, plow impacted snow from the street.

Almost always after I've shoveled it clean at least once.

This snow is never light and fluffy. This is the snow that kills people (heart attacks are frequently caused by shoveling when in poor shape).

So this afternoon I took to the sidewalk again. I worked to avoid the heart attack ('cause I'm in poor shape) by taking my time. The temperature was acceptable and there was little wind. I've got one of those bent-handled shovels so I don't have to hunch as much to lift the blocks of ice created by the plows. Scoop, turn, dump, repeat, pause, repeat some more.

After finishing my 40-foot wide sidewalk, and clearing the fifteen foot barrier in the alley, I was wiped out, so I sat in front of the tube for a bit, griping about my back.

I remember reading once about a nearby, more affluent city whose plows would pause in front of driveways, lower a shield, and press the snow past cleared driveways without clogging them with the wall of debris. I'm not expecting quite that degree of care, given the speed at which they can clear the city streets without pausing every few dozen feet, but I would expect after so many years of this that someone could have developed something better. Sure, the result is merely inconvenient, and some of my neighbors (with the same sized yard), do have snow blowers to combat this inconvenience. If I had one, I don't think I'd have a problem hitting the whole sidewalk, corner to corner; it's a gentle walk behind a more-or-less self-propelled machine, right?

Hmmm...maybe that's the excuse I need to justify one...