Tá Sé Ag Cur Sneachta!

We live on a corner. See?

And that greyish rectangle below the arrow -- the one that's not the house, I mean -- that there's our driveway. See?

This is annoying enough as it is. If I'm coming from the north, I have to pull a 360-degree turn just to get in the driveway -- or else I have to pull forward and back in, which confuses the hell out of the poor bastard behind me. From the south it's not so bad: I can pull straight in and only once in a while scare the shit out of oncoming traffic by appearing to veer into their lane. But once I've fronted in, I've committed to backing out -- and although I know that I can swing around without actually causing a twelve-car pileup, the twelve cars piling up don't always know. So I tend to sit in the driveway with the engine running for an hour and a half, waiting for there to be no traffic coming, even though the traffic isn't technically in my way.

And you wonder why I drink.

Anyway, like I say, all of this is usually bad enough. But then winter comes. And, along with winter, snow.

Now, our street is, for all intents and purposes, a dead end. From where it starts at our house, you can see it abruptly ending in a poorly fenced-off cliff-drop to the water, but it's not officially labelled that way because there's a paper street down at the end that runs parallel to the river for about a hundred yards (and if you don't know what a paper street is, it's a street that's listed on all the maps -- it's named and everything -- but is not, in fact, actually there). And, since there are only six or eight houses on this allegedly-not-dead-end street, we tend to be a pretty low priority for snowplows. If they do come (which they only do when the snowfall exceeds a certain depth), they tend to make one run straight down the middle and leave it at that.

Except for the corner. They always plow the corner. They have to. Otherwise the whole street would be blocked off by accumulated snowplow piles like your driveway always is as soon as you finish shoveling. So, even if they don't go down our street, they do our corner. Our corner. And when they do, one of two things happens:

Either they come in from the north, take a very wide turn and shove the snow up against the fence on the other side of the road, in which case we have to shovel twice the distance of our driveway out into the middle of the road. Or they come in from the south, take a very wide turn, and shove the snow in our driveway.

Seriously, Mister Snowplow Fellow, do you not see the minivan sitting there? Do you think for one second that it might be just a decoration? Do you find Chuck (TFT) so beautiful that you can imagine him installed permanently in the front lawn as an ornament? Grr!

Needless to say, this is what happened yesterday. We shovelled a foot and a half of snow on Saturday morning, then another half a foot on Sunday afternoon, and when the plow finally came by on Sunday evening, it took one quick corner-sweep and blocked me in. I was watching football when it happened so I didn't notice, but Johnny was looking out the window and he did. He was livid. But then the snowplow guy made the mistake of pulling over to the side of the road a small ways down and sitting for a while. Johnny didn't even put a coat on, he just slammed out the door and went speed-marching through the sunset snow. I wasn't privy to the conversation, but he filled me in when he marched back. It went like this:

tap tap tap on shotgun-side glass; snowplow guy rolls down window

"Ye're not going to leave tha' like tha'!"

"Leave wha'?"

"Me driveway! Ye blocked me feckin' in!"

"Ah, jaysus, Oi'm sorry man."

"Where ye from?"

"County Meath. Ye're Dub?"

"Feckin' right."

"Ach. Oi'll come clear that fer ye, straigh'away."

And he did. Turned right around, came back, and spent five minutes backing up and turning around and clearing out the mess he'd put there. Other plows came by later and put some back, but not much. Not shoved right in there. Just the standard side-of-the-road stuff that everybody deals with. Not more than I could clear away in five minutes on my way to work.

But I don't have to. Because this morning, when I woke up, the drive was clear. Scraped down to the asphalt, snowplow clear. Big blue lawn ornament still parked in there and everything.

Gosh, but it's nice to be on the inside of a Townville clan for a change!