Cold day out there this morning. Had rain and freezing rain yesterday that coated the trees so everything is covered with ice this morning. When I walked the dogs this morning and took this picture, I believe the temperature was around 10 with a wind chill bringing the temp to around -6. It has been colder. There’s been snow on the ground since it snowed weeks ago and the weather does not warm up enough to melt much of it. We had a couple of days slightly above freezing just prior to this ice but it melted everything just enough to cause a huge mess.
More ice covered trees. The snow is frozen with a nice top layer of ice that makes it really hard to walk the dogs.
We have quite a few white birch and some of them are seriously bending because of the weight of the ice covering the branches.
I wonder if we’ve made a big mistake moving here. I don’t really mind the cold and snow – I just don’t like shoveling the snow. I used to have a corner property with sidewalks but a small driveway so I just exchanged the long sidewalks with a long driveway in the new house. I’m not sure that was a good deal.
This was the first big snow that I had to shovel and I had been trying to get the snow blower working but I did not really have time to really work on it because I had to get this snow shoveled. This took two days to complete. After I finished this, I was able to spend some time working on the old snowblower.
We picked this late 1960’s (either 1967 or 1968) Ariens snowblower up for free through Freecycle on Long Island. The owner told me it needed a new carb – that would not really be a surprise. The first thing I found was that the throttle cable was completely frozen and would not move. A little PB Blaster, oil, and CRC Lithium Grease, it works pretty good. I then checked for spark and found no spark at the plug. I did a little research on the snowblower and then on how to remove the flywheel to get to the points and was able to check the points. They were a mess and needed to be filed down quite a lot so I managed to get that done, put it all back together, checked for spark again and whoohoo, it worked. I had spark. I took the carb bowl off and everything looked clean so I decided to try to fire it up. It took quite a few pulls but I got it working!
A week later, it snowed again enough for me to test it out for real and it fired up again with little trouble and I was able to use it to clean the driveway again.
Now, at least, I have a somewhat working snowblower but that does not really help with ice.
I Wander Where I'll Go 