I got to the door in time to yell to the UPS guy delivering my fancy crab meat from Luke’s Lobster that WE HAVE AN ICE RINK HERE SO BE CAREFUL.

Our Ice Rink is a very localized one. It occurs just outside our front door, off our porch. The drainpipe from the gutter drips snow melt when the weather warms up and it collects on the driveway and FREEZES INTO A FLAT SHEET OF GLARE ICE. An ice rink. In general, the sidewalks around here are dry at the moment. At least they were this morning. It is snowing to beat the band tonight.

I am an Ice Engineer after a lifetime of living in the Great Lake State. What works the best is that after you have cleared your sidewalk, you throw some salt down on whatever is left. This [usually, see caveat] prevents your sidewalk from turning into an ice rink. If you do not throw some kind of EFFECTIVE de-icer down on your sidewalk, whatever is left will re-freeze and turn into an ice rink. Skates anyone? Caveat: If there’s an ice storm none of this applies.

Throwing salt on an ice rink doesn’t really work all that well. I think both the GG and I have thrown salt on the rink in the pic twice. I started thinking maybe sand would work better? I mean if we put enough sand on it, at least it might provide more traction because the salt just seems to be melting little holes in the ice without getting rid of the whole goddamn rink. He kvetched about that at first, like then we would be schlepping sand into the house. But then he went over to Vet’s Park to get some sand, etc. Where my brain was going with the whole tracking sand into the house thing was that people are ALWAYS tracking sand into the moomincabin in the summer and we just deal with it…

I am sometimes the Ice Police too although I have never turned in a neighbor as much as I may have wanted to. I *have* stealth salted people’s sidewalks from time to time. If you ever see a totally black (small b) figure in a balaclava and long skirt out by your sidewalk in the dark of winter, it’s me and you know you’ve violated my rules (and probably the Planet Ann Arbor’s too). But I won’t turn you in.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.