Never do battle with a snow plow...

This winter has been one for the books.  But I think I'm old enough to say that this is just an old fashioned winter.  We used to get these kinds of snow storms and ice storms all the time in Zanesville where we grew up.  We lived down at the bottom of a BIG hill, at the end of the road, in the woods.  Just a turn-around at the end of our driveway.  The snow plow usually stopped at the top of the hill cause he figured no one lived down there.  I don't know how he would know -- never came to see.  Anyhow, it seems we were always trying to get the car up the hill, pushing, digging, pushing some more, spinning tires.  Dad would sometimes park the car at the top of the hill if there was a forecast of a big snow overnight.  Got pretty cold walking up that hill at 6:00 so we could ride to school with him on his way to work. And the stories he always told about walking up hill, 5 miles in the snow to school each day -- both ways -- always made us feel a bit wimpish when we finally got to the car and it wouldn't warm up for about 10 min. or so.   If we had to take the bus, we had to walk about 2 miles thru the snow out to Dresden Road (the main road there) and we had to be there by 6:45. 

Anyway, now back to the present.  McCartyville Road usually gets hit pretty hard in the winter.  Not only does it snow quite a bit here, but the wind (the same wind I have mentioned several times in these articles) seems to delight in piling up 5-6 foot drifts all along the road.  Hoying Road isn't any better.  There's one place where the wind piles drifts up taller than the truck.

Sure looks cold !!

Well, it seems that the last ice storm was a real bad one.  Really hard to remove.  The roads were really bad and the snow plows had their work cut out for them.  One day, the driver got a running start and came down the road, throwing ice and snow everywhere.  Trouble was, the wave of ice smacked up against our mailbox and snapped it off at the ground.  Didn't hurt the box any, just snapped it off.  I've seen others hit by that kind of mess that looked like a handful of cherry bombs were set off inside.  Poor box just lay there.  That also necessitated my going to the Anna post office every day to get mail.

Well, I called the county engineer and told them about it.  My neighbors and everyone at Pam's work said I was just out of luck -- they wouldn't do anything about it.  Wrong-O!  The lady at the engineer's office said they would have a crew come out and fix it.  They would have replaced the box one time too.  I told her the box was fine, but the ground was still frozen and I couldn't get a post hole digger in the ground.

They came out on schedule and we scraped away at the snow, trying to find where the box had originally been.  We made a good guess and they tried to dig a hole, only to find out that I was right.  A couple of days later, a crew came out with a big blow-torch type thing and fired up the ground. They also added this red construction barrel for the temporary box.  Let me tell you -- I was the envy of the whole neighborhood!!!!  Nobody else had one of these.  The only thing that would have made it better was some yellow POLICE LINE tape. 

Well, they got it all put back together and I'm back in business. Seems that if I had lived on Turtlecreek Road (a road plowed by the township) I would have been on my own.  But since I live on McCartyville Road (one done by the county) I was in luck. 

Oh, by the way, we had another big ice and snow storm a week later and I drove down McCartyville Road.  Saw three boxes down from that one.  Guess that just affirms that next year I will put up one of those board things on the "target" side of the mail box to take the blow from the flying snow.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned from this experience:  Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome.

Hooah