The other morning I called up early to find if street cleaning was suspended as there was still a ton of snow and ice from a previous storm in the spaces. Street cleaning was still in effect despite the fact they didn't remove the snow. Just sayin':)
I worked in Minneapolis for 11 years. We would take off from our front step on cross-country skis and spend a few hours touring the Coon Creek Preserve. Was like going from the metro neighborhood to Baffin Island. Guy up the street bought an
ReplyDeleteold 4WD International Scout, added a couple of storage batteries, built a plow and
made a fortune after each blizzard clearing driveways at $5 a pop. (He did mine
free if I loaned him my skis) About that time the snowmobile became popular and
the damned things would be tearing up and down the street sounding like giant bumblebees. One time I was out on skis along the creek and had to help an idiot
fish his snowmobile out the the creek: it had gone through the ice. Now in Idaho's lowest valley, it is much more pleasant- except for last weeks surprise 11" of white
stuff. Went by the dentist office and the techs were out during lunch building an
igloo. Pretty neat, they packed snow into some square plastic boxes to make the
bricks. I think old Doc Wilson must be part Inuit.
Snow-wise, I'm thinking Saty might be in that NC storm.
ReplyDeleteYes i am been at work since yesterday gonna be here til tomorrow night and not happy.
ReplyDeleteBtw. 9"plus at our house.
ReplyDeleteDiscovery Channel is gonna have a new reality show later this month about American loggers trying their luck in Siberia. My bet somebody will say something controversial and we'll all be talking about it.
ReplyDeleteSo last night I'm watching the Olympics and around 9 I think it was there's this flash of light and a great big boom and the place shook. I look outside and it's pouring rain, couple more lightning flashes and I'm like oh good this'll melt the crap and then it changed over to snow again a half hour later. Strange. You'd think in this age of an advanced civilization, smartphones and space travel we'd have the art of snow removal down to a science. If I were in charge I'd be like we have to find a way not just to plow but to melt the stuff, get rid of the crap totally. We got smartphones and tablets but we're stuck indoors, makes no sense.
ReplyDeleteWe are somewhat better off than back in the day .
ReplyDelete"The Children's Blizzard", I have that book at home and it's not an ebook either so all the guests can see and marvel at the variety of topics on my shelf.
DeleteIts all Gods wrath for A&E suspending Robertson. And gay folk.
ReplyDeletePat Robertson used to talk smack like this back in the day. Who knew acts of sodomy could change weather patterns? Mr. G: "The anal front is moving in..."
DeleteLittle old lesbians get married, civilization collapses. Its purely logic. Read up on the Church Militant. This persecution complex i always talk about is real and rooted in church history.
ReplyDeleteWith the RC Church it's ALL sex Saty not just the carpetmunchers. The Church has also had a big historical problem with even married couples having sex just for sex sake. Used to be your aim should be to procreate thus your big Irish families to this day then they started loosening up with the NFP and even here ya got your ultra-orthodox ultra-traditionalist sects of Catholicism saying JP2 went too far. Maybe in another 30 or 40 years they'll get down with bc but by then we'll all be dead:)
DeleteConducting an app test (UC Browser).
ReplyDeleteand so it goes.
ReplyDeleteYou got one of those snow removal apps yet?
ReplyDeleteJust a touch more snow tonite then milder weather. Old Man Winter raped us.
ReplyDeleteE-mail from bro-in-law, NW Wisconsin: they finally got above zero this morning and
ReplyDeleteonly 5" snow last night. Polar Vortex: sounds like a 24 Oz. Bloomberg soda.
Despite the winter we've been having the media still insists on talking about global warming!
ReplyDelete& what the hell is happening in England and the River Thames???
ReplyDeleteSpanish Armada, again?
DeleteIn other news according to the UN Rodman's new BFF is a monster.
ReplyDeleteHey BB what's the deal with salt? Is this not the millionth shining example of the basic inefficiency and incompetency of government?
ReplyDeleteSalt? Too much winter, not enough stocks. Apparently, we average 10-15 million tons per year, which local guv stockpiles based on historic use. I don't know about the supply chain, but producers typically do not store large amounts (inventory =
ReplyDelete$$ not working) so when stocks dwindle, prices rise. I suppose an alternate scenario
would be that Christie cornered the market. Have never figured out the appeal of
sea salt. Salt is salt, the world around, ya know? Ever see a couple of old ladies
argue over sugar from cane vs sugar from beets? Corrosivity: never buy a used car
from Minneapolis. Along the freeways there, nothing grows for 20 ft either side of the
roadway. They have done to the ground what the Romans did to Carthage. The runoff corrodes pipes and kills fish. Get down around zero and salt is useless. Lots
of trade-offs there.
I heard the salt for NJ was stuck in Maine 'cause of some federal legal regulation and they couldn't get a waiver to get around for that foreign supplier or something like that. It could be that and/or it could be what you said but doesn't anyone ever consider the Farmer's Almanac and long-range forecasts? Whatever happened to sand? Hell use kitty litter! wouldn't mind in the least to be behind some spreader spraying out Hartz on some highway. Better if it's the scented type!
DeleteYou bring up some interesting economics. Highway salt is mined and is
Deleterelatively unprocessed: about $36/ton. Kitty litter is refined bentonite clay, also mined. Some cat-friendly additives, of course. I did the cost
roll out on 'Friendly Step'. The household size runs $0,47/lb ($940/ton)
and the larger units like for animal shelters is $0.43/lb ($854/ton), so the
taxpayers would be getting screwed even more than normal. Now, an
enterprising Yonkers guy COULD get some tons of bentonite at $150,
sell it to the highway personnel at say $200/ton, save the rest, add a
few cat-friendly chemicals and sell that at $940/ton. A profit of $50 a ton
for highway bentonite and a profit of $750/ton on 'Big Apple Kitty Litter'
minus packaging and overhead. Assuming your yard is big enough for
several tons of the stuff. :)
How expensive can sand be?
ReplyDeleteAbout $10/ton- the fracking stuff is higher. Back in the day all roads were sand, but we had to go and make improvements, ya know?
ReplyDeleteSo what I think we're seeing here is that when it comes to emergency things like simple snow removal the Gov't really has no Plan B (unless we're talking about abortion of course where there's a plan b c d e subsidized by the taxpayers...). Ya know BB we're supposed to be an advanced civilization at least sort of. Not asking for perfection here by any stretch but during those nice warm summer months it might be worth government better researching the matter of snow removal. Ya know?
ReplyDeleteIf you have sold 10 pounds of chicken salad a week for the past 100 years, you probably will place a weekly order with your supplier for 10 pounds of chicken.
ReplyDeleteIf you get a huge run of customers and sell out of all 10 pounds of chicken salad in the first 30 minutes of Monday, does it mean that you're a shitty manager?
Well when it comes to rock salt, sand or what have you you'd think there'd be reserve stocks on hand for the occasional oddball winter. They say global warming is screwing up normal weather patterns so with this in mind you'd think the need for extra provisions would be obvious. Does it mean gov't is a shitty mgr.? in my book yes.
DeleteAnd meanwhile all the Republicans are denying climate change hand over fist. Cmon, you want things both ways, and you can't have that.
DeleteDuring those recent 2-3 weeks of rather constant snowfall what with the shoveling and walking instead of driving I happily and rather easily shed at least 8 pounds. Climate change???
DeleteAnother option: out in the intermountain west, they just barricade the highways across high passes and wait for Spring to come...literally dozens of highways.
ReplyDeleteYellowstone Park, for example, has five highways leading into it, but only one remains open in winter. Come to think of it, sounds like your area there in Yonkers!
Yonkers - I don't live near a main road so even when the main roads are ok after a snowstorm you enter my neighborhood and it's like another world. Of course there always has to be a Hummer coming the other way when you're almost home. The thing of it is we're paying alot of taxes so if Yonkers is gonna enforce street cleaning rules and everybody moves to the opposite side say on a Tuesday why isn't anyone cleaning the snow near the curb? I'm not saying it's easy but you two seem to be saying local gov't is doing the best it can with the snow situation and I'm simply saying we can study the issue and so improve traditional snow removal. My thing is I want more bang for the buck for my taxes. No things ain't gonna be perfect but alot of this snow can be removed and dumped somewhere like they do in White Plains. I'm just a curmudgeonly taxpayer what do you want?
DeleteSome places do scoop up the snow and pile it somewhere. I guess for Yonkers that would be the place where they ran out of salt? What used to bug me back in Wi & MN, the plows ran night and day and right after
Deleteyou finished clearing your driveway, the snow rig would tear by leaving a
4 foot berm of snow and ice across the exit. I'd recommend you move to
Atlanta, but they don't handle even a skift of snow very well. You see any
of those snowy owls yet?
Those plows probably create most of those road craters by digging up the concrete. "berm" - that word came up in the Sunday crossword a few weeks back.
ReplyDeleteSince the weather community is constantly coming up with new meteorological buzzwords (polar vortex) might I propose "winter portal."
ReplyDeleteHope we are not heading into another1816 Winter .
ReplyDeleteI'm no historical expert but it strikes me that the whole 1800's was extremely rough weatherwise, that and women dying in childbirth. You know it's funny when it's extremely hot in summer I want winter and now I want summer.
DeleteWe had a few more inches just a couple of days ago, making that 13" for the month.
ReplyDeleteSome winters we have hardly any. One winter we got 16" in one day. I was in charge of the explosives production/loading plant because the plant mgr. was off on
Christmas vacation. Our inplant vehicles were sliding off the streets and spinning out
and the plow our maintenance plant sent up from downtown got behind and stuck in the bunker complex. I called and asked what could be done or I'd have to close down. They said the corp. had a snow emergency contract with the big gravel pit down by the river and they would send up a big front end loader. Could barely see
the thing coming up to the security gate as the blizzard had turned into a whiteout.
I went out, got blown over a couple times and slipped on the ice; looked about 18 feet up at the operator and said "glad you're here" "You know where to plow". He
shouted down through the wind, "Hell, I ain't ever been out of the pit!" Retirement
has been nice....
Over here in NYC, forget which borough but a snowplow killed a pregnant woman in a commercial parking lot. Nice to live old enough to retire but these days you never know.
DeleteCouple more months of this weather and the Yonkers habitat will include snowshoe
ReplyDeletehare and Arctic fox. You might wanna trade a cat or two for some Malamutes.
Throw in a couple polar bears on ice floes floating down the Hudson. Finally got my couple 20lb. bags of rock salt at Stew Leonard's yesterday.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of that song-
ReplyDelete"Oh, the weather outside is frightful
but my salt is quite delightful
Since I'm stuck and cannot go
Stop the snow, stop the snow, stop the snow!"
So yesterday somebody messed up the deep fryer and the night crew obviously used the dirty greasy mop he used to clean up the fryer oil all over the floor and I come in this morning and all the floors are greasy and slippery 'cause nobody thought of wringing out the greasy mop or getting another one to mop the floors and here I am worried about the snow and the ice. This is not rocket science people!
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of a given in shift work; towards the end of the shift, folks slack off, the
ReplyDeletenew shift coming in has to start by cleaning up. How often do they change the
fryer? I still haven't figured out how to mop correctly: do the basement floor once in awhile and I always end up with streaks. I need to see about hiring a scullery maid.
Supposed to be once a week BB. The correct way to mop a large area of a floor like a kitchen is to first dunk the mop in a clean bucket of soapy water then slosh the mop all over the floor back and forth, go back to the mop bucket wring out the mop nice and dry and then go over everything with the dry mop. At least that's the way I was taught.
DeleteIf i made a fb closed page would you go there?
ReplyDeleteI've never been on FB (believe it or not) but I would. Problem lately is the time factor but it's probably better as you say.
DeleteThere are two pluses I see to moving (somewhat) onto a FB page. One, it can be made private if you want it that way. Even if it's a public page or an open page you still have a lot more control over who sees what. Two, it's so much easier to use on mobile than a regular web page. I don't know, it's up to you. I'd be happy to put a page together.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a FB account just yet but it wouldn't have to be private. Easier to use on mobile is definitely a plus since even with my app my blog is somewhat cumbersome. I'd like to see BB on Facebook.
ReplyDeleteWhat say you BB?
ReplyDeleteI remember a few years ago the young'ens at work all the rage was MySpace now you don't hear about that anymore.
ReplyDeleteWell lets start with you get on FB and find me and i will add you to my list. Its a rather exclusive list just sayn.
ReplyDeleteMy truck wouldn't start at the store yesterday. I had to borrow a phone and they gave me a cellphone. Then they had to turn it ON for me. When I was finished
ReplyDeletethey had to turn it OFF for me. I can mine data like a whirlwind, but I cannot adapt
to those little e-things.
& what's funny is when you first talk on a cell phone and it's this small device and your mouth is so far away and you're like are they gonna hear me when I talk? but somehow they do and you get used to it.
ReplyDeleteWhen they make one that has an on and off button and nothing else, and actually works in the Rockies & Great Plains, I might reconsider. Folks call me on their cellphones and the audio is bad and intermittent: then stops when their battery dies.
DeleteBefore I got my cell phone I always had trouble hearing my friend on his cell. The one I got now the LG the reception is great. You can call your doctor from the grocery parking lot and it's like you're both in the same room.
Delete