Food freshness labeling update

I am referring to the modern addition to the labels of all things consumable, the best if used by date.

Of late I have begun occasionally answering the question of "how are you" from folks who I have not seen recently with the explanation that I believe I am doing pretty well for a person quite clearly past my best if used by date.

Which is a long way to get around to the actual title of this post.  Yes, you must ignore what appears at the top of the post.  That is really only the introduction to the definitions section.  The real post title is:

Gentleman well past his best if used by date subdues residue of 5 inch snowstorm without use of power tools.

Our earliest requirement for a start today was TOPWLH wanting to leave for an open house by about 4pm.  I started my shoveling about 7 hours after TT.  I know that the municipality where I live plows after every event of 2 inches or more so I spent the morning hunkered down waiting for the plows to plow.  This is the preferred approach here.  If you clear the snow before the plow arrives, that just means you have to go back out after the plow leaves and redo a considerable portion of the task anyway.

So after the plow left I opened the garage door and started as I always do with a shovel to push away that snow nearest to the garage door.  This is a necessary step.  The garage door MUST be closed when using a snowblower.  With the door closed it is necessary on the up driveway bit to turn enough before you actually get to the door to leave room for a human being between the machinery and the door to allow someone to be in control when the down driveway bit begins.  Where the snowblower turn leaves snow covered pavement is a bit that is going to have to be shoveled anyway.  My approach is to do that bit of shoveling first.

I pushed the snow down the driveway, it was light and fluffy (albeit 5 inches of light and fluffy).  That first push went pretty smoothly so I gave one more across the width of the driveway repetition of the down driveway push.  My driveway has four sections of concrete between garage and street and after the third round of push I was very nearly at the end of the first (and longest) of the sections.  I had also discovered that the car tracks from early morning newspaper delivery (two cars pull in, two cars pull out, a four repetition compacting) were reacting to the relatively balmy temperatures by still being available for easy scraping.  The compacted snow came up with it only being necessary to apply about the same amount of force that I was applying just to move the increasingly deep light and fluffy pile.  Most often the driven on stuff is packed down hard and is well on its way to being there until April.  Not today.

Well now, soon enough I had two sections of driveway done and I was starting to think that this might be possible.

And it almost was.  Finally though I had to quit at about this point.  My pulse, breathing and body cooling mechanisms were all beginning to complain.

In short that was about all I could do, I was more or less completely used up, knackered.  I required a bit of a lie down.

That's pretty darn good though.  On the house side of the driveway there I have completed shoveling all four sections of my driveway.  That remaining snow is actually in the street and although I generally do clear that I feel considerably less responsible for that than I do for the bit actually on my concrete.

On the field side of the driveway I am down two sections.  Also at the bottom I have shoveled a foot path through to the street (what I refer to as reestablishing contact with civilization) and I have gone around and rescued the trash container from deep in the deep stuff.  Friday is trash day here, what with the recent Festivus, today was the day when our trash was actually picked up.

I was out there when the trash guy showed up.  It was such a horrible day for travel that our trash company had to put auxiliary trucks into service to try to get pick ups completed.  The guy who showed up at our house was using some sort of antique truck that did not even have a side dumper.  He had to stop the truck, get out, get a firm grip on the trash container and drag it to the back of the truck where it hooked up to a lift.  He then had to move a lever on the side of the truck to get the trash to dump into the back.

Really, really old school truck from back in the day when trash pick up was done by trucks with two man crews.  Today being operated by a single man.

He seemed pretty thankful that I pulled the receptacle out of the snowdrift and moved it out towards the middle of the street for him.

The mail came, I chatted with the mail lady.  But I really had pretty much nothing for additional snow removal.

So I went back inside and took a fairly significant lie down.

I am pleased to report that even a gentleman obviously past his best if used by date can still rally if given an opportunity for a fairly significant lie down.

Lighting conditions probably tell most of the story.  The above picture is sunny mid-afternoon.  The picture below is just before the light went out.

At least a couple of hours had passed.

But my driveway looks great and it was all done by a gentleman well past his best if used by date without use of power tools.

Did I mention we had about 5 inches here?  Because I definitely meant to.