After two weeks away, I was dreading what we might come back to find in our driveway. Thankfully a neighbour apparently cleared the foot of our driveway after the plow came by, so that saved me from the worst of it.

But the front sidewalk still had to be dealt with. And deal with it I did. What I had to do shouldn’t really be described as “shovelling”; it was more like snow mining.

There were three or four inches of hard-packed snow-coal stretching my section of the sidewalk. I would spend 20 or 30 seconds jamming at it with my special mining shovel, then 10 or 20 seconds bending down to collect the raw ore (with some chunks being a couple square feet in size) and toss the chunks onto the lawn, presumably so they could be collected and processed into some valuable mineral.

I’ll never complain about having to shovel fresh, soft snow again.

Okay, who am I kidding: of course I’ll still complain.