Marty’s photos of the day #4557: Fun with snow! You’re looking at the good version of “fun”: the view from my writing room window this morning.

The not so fun version of the 7 inches of snow we received was that Deb and I were without electricity for about 5 hours yesterday (the heavy snow caused a tree to fall on a power line). Late this summer, we resurfaced our long gravel driveway with fresh gravel and boulder removal. Then I bought a new EGO battery powered snowblower.

Well, my EGO snowblower never made it out of the garage this morning, because the drive mechanism is defective (I will exchange the snowblower for another one when I go to Missoula next week). That meant I had to use my old gas snowblower this morning. As it turned out it was probably a good thing, as the ground didn’t have a chance to freeze and the old gas snowblower was picking up small rocks all over the place. I went through three shear bolts, gave up on those, went to regular bolts, and when they broke I used big nails. As expected, I eventually fried my old gas snowblower. I was going to get rid of the old gas snowblower anyway, so it’s not a big loss. And since I got the majority of the driveway snow-blowed before it died (I shoveled the rest), I’m hopeful that the worst of the rocks are now gone too.

The whole “fry the snow blower” project took three hours, leaving me a little sore. So now I’m going to hangout in my writing room for the rest of the day, working on my latest novel, “Barry and Beth,” and enjoying the fun view out my windows.