The Winter Of My Discontent

by capper

I usually enjoy the winter. The cold doesn't bother me and I only get annoyed with the snow when it hampers travel plans. But the last couple of years have really caused me to start rethinking my attitude towards winter.

Last year, on Valentine's Day, the wonderful and beautiful mrs. capper, on her way to work, hit a patch of black ice and lost control. She spun out and went down a steep hill, driver's side first, towards a small copse of trees. Fortunately, she didn't roll the car and it stopped snug up against a tree, instead of into it. She was shaken but not hurt, but the car was totaled. When I got to the scene of the accident, I literally became ill, because I saw how close I came to losing the love of my life. I've been on edge whenever she has to drive in winter weather since then.

Fast forward to this year. This past weekend, my bride and I went up to our home away from home, our place up north. It was the first time in three weeks that we got the chance to go, because of the weather, and we were both anxious to get back there. When we arrived, we found snow drifts that were four to five feet deep in places, not to mention the end of the drive where the plow placed another four foot tall wall of snow.

Even with the snow blower snapping two shearing pins, we managed to get all the snow cleared out of the drive. The next day we dug out the mailbox and I cleared the three feet of snow off the front porch. I figured I'd do the garage and the main roof Sunday morning. I obviously thought wrong.

Sunday morning, we heard a muffled "whoompf" and ran outside to find this.




That's the inside of what was our garage. To make it even worse, my Highlander was parked in the garage.




And to make sure I got the point, or maybe just to add insult to injury, the garage also took out "the Lambeauni," my Packer-orientated lawn tractor.

Then, as I was scurrying in and out of the garage trying to salvage things before it collapsed, I had a rafter fall on my head given me a slight cut and a large lump. Oh, I'm telling you, this is not going down as one of my better weekends.

The construction crews should be out tomorrow to try to peel the garage door out and hoist the roof enough to get my vehicle out, then we have to wait and see if it salvageable or not. The Lambeauni probably can be fixed, if we can get it out of there.

Everyone tells me that we should be grateful that no one was in the garage at the time, and no one got hurt. I know that they are right, and I am glad that we are OK. Things can be replaced, but people can't. But still, this sucks. Considering the amount of time that the garage sits empty, why did it have to pick one of the rare occasions by car was inside of it before collapsing?

And no, I wasn't doing this to make Bill feel better, and I am not going to blame Walker.

UPDATE: They got the car out of the garage, and to the body shop. It still runs, but the amount of damage vs. the worth of the vehicle makes it still iffy whether or not they decide to total the car.

Thank you everyone for your kind thoughts.