The Do-It-Yourself Show

Manual labor and I are not the best of friends these days.

Well, it's not that I mind ALL manual labor. After all, I painted without incident. I'm good with that kind of work.

Mostly, it's the kind of manual labor that requires that I trail myself behind a large, heavy piece of equipment that I do not have the manpower to move on my own without the motor running, all while wearing horrible boots that have zero traction in the snow. Can you guess to what I am referring?

I snow blowed today. Again.

Remember the last time I cleared our driveway, I told you that I had not mastered the 'art' of it. Well, today I decided that it's not art. Not even close. It's sort of like a bad joke really. I kept thinking to myself, 'I could be the DIY channel's comic relief reality show.' Seriously.

I did smarten up a bit this time though. I figured out quickly which way the wind was blowing and adjusted my plan of attack so as to keep the snow from blowing right back into my face. So I managed to stay much dryer than the last time.

I did, however, manage to choke it do death. Basically I have zero understanding of the function of a choke on mechanical equipment. So, since I don't understand it, I don't think about it.... aka, I forget about it totally. So I was plugging along just fine, and then all of a sudden, the blower stopped blowing the snow, and it was more like plopping out at a very slow rate. And then the whole thing started to sputter. Then it died. Uggh! Not knowing WHAT was wrong with the thing (I thought I had run it out of oil or something... the only thing I knew for sure was that it wasn't out of gas because I could see that.) So.... here's the funny-to-watch-but-not-to-live-through part... I manually pushed (at least attempted) the snow blower from my neighbor's driveway back to our garage.... and my boots had zero traction... so I was sort of slipping and falling all over the place. I'm sure I looked plain crazy.

You know, I did have a brief sense of accomplishment when it was all done. And then I went outside around 7:00 to put the garbage out and the driveway was completely covered again. Grrr.

Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll get to do it all over again tomorrow. If so, I WILL be wearing different boots.

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