Well, this morning I was looking around for an axe!

Snow began to fall from this nor’easter on Friday night and continues with high winds gusting to 80 knots well into Saturday afternoon. My Public Works guys were out Friday night and Saturday morning when our loader with large plough and wing on it lost the engine. I don’t mean that it is hiding and we can’t find it, I mean it just crapped out, stopped running, gave up the ghost...... After a couple of hours we were able to get it going again but it was running weakly with a sad knocking noise. We took it down to the Public Works compound and let it rest while we got on with the show removal job. Since we lost a big slice of our snow clearing gear we called in local contractors and later in the day as it became obvious that there was going to be a significant accumulation we also called them in to help us truck the snow off to an open field in town. The guys, town employees and contractors, have been working steadily since Friday night and early Saturday morning, taking breaks to get some food and to sleep and as I sit her I can see that they are on the finishing touches of clearing away the accumulation on the main roads.

In spite of all that I was still getting telephone calls from people this morning:

“I pay my taxes, the parking spots in front of my business is still covered with snow! I want it cleared by 11h00”

“Whatever idiot ploughed in front of my house knocked off the manhole cover. Get up here and fix it!”

“When you ploughed the snow on the street you put a ridge of snow across my laneway. I’m too old to shovel that. Get back here and plough it out!”

.....and my guys tell me that they were getting more while they were out working....

Un-be-lieve- able!

Like I said, good thing that I couldn’t find an axe.

Meanwhile in the midst of the storm social life went on. Barb did up a great curry dinner for some of our friends on Saturday night and our neighbours Murray and Cindy had their own with a sideboard full of appetizers and when those were gone the empty dishes were replaced with pineapple chicken with rice and Chinese Salad, which in turn was followed by pineapple upside down cake with whipped cream.

Yummy!

Now I will have to starve myself for a week or more to let my stomach shrink back to normalcy.