kevin_standlee | Volunteer Snow Removal

This morning after breakfast (nearly free after winning $16 off a free-play coupon from the Wigwam Restaurant/Casino), I walked around downtown Fernley as I often do. The Fernley Christmas Parade was scheduled for this evening at 5 PM (after dark this year so people could actually see the lights on all of the floats).

Fernley looked just right for a Christmas parade today.

There was just enough snow to make things look suitable for a northern-hemisphere Christmas...

...without being so slushy or stormy as to prevent the parade from happening (or people coming out to see it) entirely.

While I was out walking, I decided that I'd had enough of a couple of downtown hazards and decided to do something about them.

It appears to be the practice that businesses on Main Street only clear the sidewalks in front of their own buildings. The city doesn't do it, and the street itself is a state highway and is cleared by the Nevada DOT. This building is one of several with no current tenants and thus has stayed uncleared all week. After once again nearly slipping on it, I considered the hazard it presented with people coming downtown and walking in the dark. I decided to fix it myself. I walked home and got the snow shovel and cleared this section of the sidewalk myself.

I then walked a couple blocks west and cleared another short section that had gone uncleared. Actually, I was a bit concerned that someone would get it into their head that I wasn't allowed to this and that only "authorized persons" (whatever that means) were allowed to remove snow from the sidewalk, or that shoveling it into the gutter was prohibited, or something like that. Nobody complained, so I did it.

After my short stint with free-lance sidewalk clearing, I went home (the exercise did me good) and dealt with a bit more snow clearance on our own property.

Lisa installed this automatic light fixture on the side of the garage. Last winter, falling snow smashed one of the bulbs.

This time, I was able to knock away the accumulation before it fell and broke the bulbs (or worse, the fixture itself). Lisa is considering putting a metal awning over this light to deal with this issue in the future and furthermore direct more light downward where it's useful.

I spent most of the rest of the day at the computer working on a project with a new piece of hardware and trying to convince it that it really does want to work with the USB 3 port on my computer. Fernley's parades form up on the street in front of our house, so when the parade started appearing, I walked back downtown to watch it. But that's a story for another entry.