Digging Out

The Pit and I ventured outside late Saturday afternoon, and took some pictures of our buried cars.

When we woke up Sunday to a beautiful sunny day, we decided that digging out would be prudent before ice formed and the cars were trapped forever. This was easier said than done though...for a start, we don't own a shovel. After taking a quick survey of our immediate neighbors and concluding that they were just as useless as us, The Pit braved the knee-deep snow and wandered over to the management office of our complex. It turned out that they had had three shovels to lend out, but that by 11 AM when The Pit came asking, two had already been broken by tenants. Consequently, there was quite a long waiting list for the sole remaining digging instrument.

At this point I had a brainstorm. There's a mall about two miles from our apartment...this is walking distance! We would attempt to buy a shovel, and get some long-overdue Christmas shopping out of the way too! Of course, high-stepping it through the snow on the as yet-uncleared sidewalks was a bit more exertion than I was expecting, and there were no shovels to be had for love or money at the stores when we arrived. However, we did get some Christmas shopping done, a task I actually found more exhausting than the walk itself. I hope our gift recipients appreciate their presents...as we literally had to walk four miles (for more old-timey cred, part of this was uphill) in the snow to get them.

However, after we trudged back to our apartment, there was still the matter of our snowed-over cars. The shovel waiting list had still not reached our name, and the afternoon was soon to turn to evening. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so we further violated the suburban taboo against neighbor interaction... we wandered until we found a house with a cleared driveway, and then knocked on their door and begged to borrow their shovels.

Fortunately, these people gave up the goods with nary a blink, and The Pit proceeded to demonstrate his manly worth by digging out both cars. Me? Well, the neighbors had given me a shovel too...I managed to immediately scratch the hood of my car with it, and then milled about getting in The Pit's way while trying to clear some ice. So basically, we resorted to our usual gender roles with minimum confusion. For further demonstration of this, recall incidents such as this and this.