Winter came back this weekend with a vengeance. We got a snowstorm on Friday. I left work a little early and actually got home before it was completely dark. Turns out you can pretty clearly tell where the space heater that is heating my home is located. It is just to the left of the door.
My truck got its first recall. Apparently some of the wiper motors can fail when it rains, which kind of defeats the purpose of wipers.
Saturday was spent clearing snow. I was pretty wiped afterwards.
Since we were supposed to get another big snowstorm on Monday and another one later in the week, I did a pretty thorough clearing, including snowblowing up to the shed.
The hillside in Keene was glowing when I went to the gym Saturday night. I thought it looked kind of cool, though my phone camera didn't capture it well.
Sunday was pretty chilly. The excavation guy was supposed to come out and take a look around to give me a quote for the slab, but he wasn't feeling well. I prepared for him anyways, and went and marked where the edges of the proposed slab would be.
Turns out 48' is right out if I wanted to push the slab back. Even at 44' it is really close to the rock shelf, and I am not sure if he can dig down far enough. I don't know the state regulations well enough to know if concreting it into the rock shelf is acceptable or not. The dark splotch is rock that has come to the surface.
All those marks are now gone though because we got a lot more snow. It was originally supposed to hold off and come in during the day, but I woke up to it at the running boards on my truck, so I am working from home today. At least now I know that the cap can handle 6-8" of snow. It is also easy to clear, new roofing slides really well.
Normally I would just clear enough to get the truck out and go in, and deal with everything when I get home, but my snowblower really didn't want to cooperate today. The first thing I noticed is that apparently the reason that the chute direction change didn't work is that the rod fell out. Not that it was usable before it fell out.
It has also developed some sort of engine problem. It started blowing smoke when under load. It does a little bit while it is idling, but it is much worse under load. My guess would be some sort of seal or gasket cracked. It still seems to run ok though, so I might just keep the oil full and run it until it blows up and hope it makes spring whereupon I have another season to replace it.
If it does blow up soon, I might just switch to an electric one. Less moving parts to break down, since the gas ones at least seem to be built like crap these days. This snowblower is less than 5 years old. Briggs and Stratton's reputation has been poor for many years now (the ongoing joke with them is it starts first pull and breaks the second pull), but they make most of the engines on stuff these days (just like MTD is confirmed garbage, but they make most of the stuff these days). I am just concerned about an electric on a ~325' driveway and ending up needing 5 sets of batteries to do my driveway. Or I could just bite the bullet and get the one for the tractor. It sucks to spend 2500 dollars on a snowblower right before taking out a mortgage, but that might suck less than have to do a big snowstorm with the tractor bucket.
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