Samaritans and Saturday Gratitudes

[flemmings]

1. It snowed another too many inches overnight. I woke to bare sidewalk because the Phantom Snowblower had been at work up and down the block.

2. TPS once again turned off his machine at the ex-Indian Gardener's house, currently under construction. I was able to push some of the soggy snow away with my ice chopper, so it will be passable in tomorrow's freeze, and my elbows and neck did not object. Cannot lift-shovel this year, which has been a worry to me.

(I do wonder what TPS' agenda is. I used to shovel snow so that I could get places, and so could other people if so minded. TPS seems to do it out of a desire to spare people the need to shovel but not to make walking easier. Otherwise he'd do the whole street.)

3. Made it to my aunt's and back, walking to and from subway because the non-existent Christie bus is even more non-existent in snow. Knees are not happy but not the spasming misery they were last night.

4. Freezing drizzle seems to have stopped for the moment and may, with luck, be covered by snow tomorrow. (I am *not* inconsistent: I am situational.)

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

My experience with people who own snowblowers in cities is that they really enjoy snowblowing. A lot of city people don't actually need a snowblower-- some do, of course, but it's not like in the country where there are winding acres of driveway that require a blower and shovels and probably an ice axe. So there's a chunk of city population who do their own little area of drive and sidewalk, in 2.5 minutes, and then are like 'this is fun, I must do more, that took 2.5 minutes NOT ENOUGH SNOWBLOWING'. So they do random other things until they get tired for the day and go in. I used to live on the same block with one of this type, and there was another near us on the main road, and I miss it; my analysis of motivation here is based on passing conversations with them.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

That's very... interesting. Is it a bloke thing, perhaps? or for those with ordinary upper body strength? Pushing a snow blower through Toronto's heavy sodden slushy snow is my idea of Sisyphean Hell, but I suppose there's an element of 'conquering malevolent nature' to it.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Both the people I ran into like this presented as male and seemed fairly athletic. One of them would literally find people who were walking along with groceries or pets or small children and snowblow the path in front of them, grinning hugely the whole while. He also did random clearing when he couldn't find anyone who needed a path, so it seemed pretty clear that being charitable was something of a pretext.

I've never been to Toronto, but the snow here is also slushy and heavy, especially a day or two after it falls. I do not personally want to interact with it in basically any way, so I do not understand the blower people, but I ran into them enough winters running to accept their strange proclivities.