[Update: Two posts below you can read me bitching about DST. Add in that this post didn’t go up ontime becasue of this!] Yesterday, I found myself doing something I’d never thought I’d do. I was shoveling water. I am used to doing this when said water is crystalized and in a form known as snow. This is Iowa after all, you have to be used to snow. Now that global warming had finally kicked back in, the snow is starting to melt, but the ground is frozen, so there really isn’t anyplace for this water to go.

I live on a corner lot, and apparantly, my sidewalks slant toward the corner. I came home last night to roughly four inches of water covering my sidewalks with a little stream trickling down from the neighbor’s. I tried to take my shovel and cut a small trench to the drainage ditch, but since the ground was rock hard, this didn’t work out too well. I did manage to get a small trench dug through my grass to start this draining, but it wasn’t going very fast and I wasn’t confident it would work anyway. So out came the old scoop shovel.

Maybe a half gallon with each toss, maybe a hundred or so tosses? And not even a dent. The grass was brittle, brown, and dry, and the water didn’t seem to be running back onto the sidewalk, but it came back as fast as I could throw, perhaps replaced by the stream from the neighbor’s. I felt like I was trying to drain a creek with a small bucket. Futile effort, but all the same, I did this for 15 or 20 minutes with little to no result other than wet shoes, sweat on my forehead, and an aching back (water is heavy). I checked my little trench and decided since it seemed to be draining about half as fast as the water was being replaced I would call it good.

A part of me is afraid I will get home tonight and notice that this trickle will have eroded a major trench through my lawn, but I somehow doubt it. My guess is most, if not all, or the water will still be there, and I can once again attack it!

Oh well, this is Iowa. In a month I’ll be complaining about the rain, not melted snow.