Rainy Day Blues

I have to say I never would have thought that I would be writing about a rainy weekend in the middle of January in Minnesota. But, well, considering that the past few days have left us with puddles everywhere -- which probably would have been a foot of snow if it had been colder -- "rainy day blues" are what I've got.

I've spent a decent amount of time this weekend going out and salting and sanding the sidewalks and driveway, but I'm sure that by tomorrow nothing will have made a difference. After all, there's only so much you can do when everything is covered in water and the temps are going to drop down into the low teens.

And have I mentioned that, on my way to work, there's a couple of pretty treacherous stretches of sidewalk? Even on the best of days there are areas that are steep enough that walking can be difficult. I'd suspect that, for the next couple of days -- if not weeks -- it will be much worse.

You see, in this part of the world, we're used to dealing with snow. Tons of it. Literally. But ice... well... that's just a whole different ballgame. I'm definitely not looking forward to driving any sidestreets in the near future, considering how bad they were prior to all of this.

There was one bright spot for the weekend, though. I got to spend about 45 minutes, yesterday working with "fluid mechanics" and engineering. Basically, that means that -- after seeing a car send out waves while driving through the intersection in front of our house -- I decided I needed to go out and try to uncover the storm drain on the side of the street.

When I was a kid, I would spend large chunks of time in the spring doing this kind of thing (as my parents can attest)-- usually followed by floating sticks in the new "rivers" and watching them eventually disappear in the culverts. Of course, this time of year most of those drains are covered by 3-foot-tall piles of snow and ice, but that just meant that I got to have a scavenger hunt prior to actually digging it out.

Eventually, I had a tunnel dug through the snow pile on either side of the drain, each connected to a canal which funnelled the run-off from a different portion of the street. Within about 10 minutes of breaking through, the street had mostly cleared, and the massive puddle at the corner of our sidewalk had turned into a few snow/ice outcroppings, instead of a flooded deadly-slick archipelago.

On the plus side, I haven't had to shovel any of this. On the minus side, I'm used to this kind of weather coming in March. Yeah. It's going to be a long winter.