I suppose it was too unrealistic to imagine that the entire winter would pass without snow. The first substantial snowfall hit us today. It wasn’t horrible, but the first one is always a little depressing. At work, it seemed like it was having trouble accumulating, but when I got home, there were 4 inches on the driveway. I hate shoveling while it is still coming down, but with that much (and with it being fairly wet) I decided to clear it off. During the shoveling, I thought about how dealing with snow here compared to Rochester. Here’s what I came up with:

  • Shoveling: Hard to say, but at worst it was a wash between the two. I thought it would be better here since the driveway and sidewalk were both shorter, but the driveway is wider too. My wife, upon reading this, will begin to have her blood boil over my continued resistance to purchasing a snow blower. But I think we’re going to be OK. I almost had Quinn help me out on the driveway, which I think he could have done. But I decided to just handle it myself this first time. Still, I believe my dream of free labor will be coming true this winter.
  • Bringing the kids in: Better here thanks to the large entrance we have. We have a mudroom coming in from the garage, but it’s tight because it’s a skinny room and the laundry machines and a double laundry tub. The front entrance has space for the kids to come in, and it’s a little more out of the way than our front entrance in Rochester. We didn’t have “snow clothes removal” as a part of our house-hunting criteria; we just got a little lucky.
  • Schedules: The snow didn’t come overnight, so we didn’t have to deal with it this morning. Oddly enough, it felt like it would have been worse to shovel and get ready to go, even though Kate and I leave around the same time and the younger kids get on the bus later. Not sure why – maybe I just hate that whole scramble and it will never seem good. The afternoon was going to be a little tricky. I was going to have to leave early to give myself time to get home for Kate’s swim practice, then work a little more from home. Which is about what I might have done before, just with a longer commute. However, Kate decided she didn’t want to swim AND CompTIA told us to get out and beat the rush. We sometimes made management calls at IBM, but since we were working with other teams in other places, it felt like the machine was still running. So this was nice.
  • Parking: My favorite one. There is a deck at the Sara Lee building, and I park all the way on the bottom. No walk through the weather, no scraping of the car. Beautiful.

Look, I am being a little tongue-in-cheek here. These things all add up to very little. But I’m still happy to have minor victories.

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