Backyard parking

WOW....I'd cut the grass all year just to live there. Shovel snow....whatever!

 

He's a pretty good task master. He feeds you and fans you, too. You're lucky, he can't get up there on the mud roads. No snow to shovel. Maybe fishing? Camping? All that rough outdoorsy stuff?

 

Just drop me in there by copter and I'll be the permanent care taker. For FREE!:2_thumbs_up_-_anima

 

Nice digs Andy!!


Next meeting is at your place!!!! LOL

 

I did a pretty good job. It drained out nicely, but there's a couple dips that I have to level out near the back of the car. A cubic yard should do it:



I was gonna go take some JY pics, when the City showed up to dig up my neighbours' water main. It seems their old pipes weren't low enough for our -50 days:

 

Is that Fahrenheit, Stormy?
I think that frost tooth is gonna break right off!

 

-50C. We call it the kiki bird's fault. ki-ki-riced it's c-c-c-cold! Probably explains why the birth rate went up this year.

We had a lot of days with -40C and winds up to 50 MPH. It was colder and stayed colder much more than many other winters. Most times, we'll be around -25C to -30C. This one was a choker.

 

That Front-End loader still hasn't gotten below the frost line after 2 hours (a little hole about 4' X 5'). Hard stuff. You have to wait until mid-may before you can even dig a post hole by hand, and even then you'll find frost.

Correction, the normal frostline. He's down about 3 feet, the watermain line is at 6. I had to repair mine years ago ($1,200), because the city's sidewalk grader hit the city valve and broke the old steel line. So I had them go lower when they put the new one in. They may have to tear the street apart (boulevard with trees in between) to fix the whole thing. Seems the homes on the other side have frozen mains too.

 

-50c = -58F and thats officially cold enuff for Hell to freeze over. We had our hardest winter here since the winter of 76-77. In that winter we had 334 inches of snow fall, our average winter for the last decade had an average of 124" of snow fall, this winter we totaled 318 inches. We have had nice weather for the last 2 weeks and there is very little snow left, only where it was piled up or the sun doesnt hit it for very long. Im so greatful to see grass again, for a long time I was shoveling out my walkway to get to the car and tossing it over the sides of the banks that were above my head and Im 6 foot even.

Here is what it looked like on my road. The left bank was 11 feet and the right 7 feet.

 

Floods are a common thing here, so we have a Flood hi-WAY. Back in the late 1940's it could get right up to the street behind us. We're 3 feet higher. Dry basement. Most of the old foundations were rail-ties in this old neighbourhood, and then basements were made just big enough to get a gas furnace in, like the house next-door.

Most people have heard about the 1997 flood. It went from the US border right up to about 20 miles North of my city and right across 2/3rds of the Province, so about 100 miles long by 200 miles wide. The Floodway was originally finished in 1966 (my dad worked on it back in 1952). After 1997, they expanded it to handle the 1 in 700 year flood. It's almost finished. Think of a HUGE Ditch (it was called Duff's Ditch for over 50 years). It takes all the flow from the US side of the Red River, plus the overflow from 2 other Canadian rivers and eases it north once the ice melts enough to flow north.

When it's -8C (24F) in Churchill, MB, at night, (500 miles North of here), I can take off the thermal plastic on my windows. We'd be at about 40F (10C) down here. The Sun is intense here, so the melting is happening even with the cold temps, but its too slow, so the Floodway acts as a buffer for the overflow, otherwise every town going North would be flooded out too. An Annual Katrina.

We just got 2 of these monsters (hydrofoil icebreakers) last year, to break up the northern run to Lake Winnipeg:
http://www.normrock.ca/1/The_Amphibex/The_Amphibex

Here's our latest flood warning:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/03/17/mb-flood-fears.html

Here's some aerial pics of the 1950 flood with a radio recording of the news report, right into the City up to the downtown police station:
http://archives.cbc.ca/environment/extreme_weather/topics/670/

Webbed feet are definitely an asset up here!

 

That reminds me of driving through to International Falls on the US/Canada border. That's a wind tunnel. You should've had a sail on the roof!

 

They just finished getting to the watermain. Now there's a committee of them all gazing down into the pit, sipping coffee. 16 people at $20 /hour? Plus the loader operator?

Hell hasn't frozen over.