Winds

As I write this, the Mid-Atlantic States are cleaning up after a nor'easter. The snow is gone but the winds remain. The winds have been around 15 to 25 mph with gusts to 35 to 40 mph in my region. Some of you may have heard about the snow fall amounts in portions of NJ, with upwards of 2 feet and then some in some portions of NJ. Many of us in western NJ escaped wit somewhere between 4 and 8 inches. I give a range because the blowing snow precludes measuring the snow.

I don't want to post a video from one of the NY/NJ news outlets. Too depressing. Rather my "snow" story for today involves the winds and my snow blower.

I'll start with a friend who came by in the wee hours and helped us out by plowing out the detritus left by the snow plows on the street. This helped a lot, believe me. But I still had the portion in the back of the house by my garage to take care of with my snow blower. Taking a lesson from my blog writings, aviation ground school, and flying, I gave thought to the winds. I found myself thinking that any pilot has to know the direction and wind speed before flying. Winds affect a pilot's choice of runways. If there is one runway (runway 4-22 for example), And if the wind is blowing across that runway, known as a cross wind, a strong enough cross wind will ground you. With this in mind, I thought about the task at hand, using my snow blower to plow out the rest of my driveway on a very windy day.

Knowing the direction that the wind was blowing was not exactly rocket science because all I had to do was to look out the windy and see the wind blown snow to know that the winds were coming from the north west. And I was using a snow blower not going flying. The worse that would happen to me with my snow blower is that I'd end up with snow in my face and down the front of my jacket. Which did happen, but only once or twice.

I knew that this time, in order to prevent the snow from coming out the chute of my snow blower and being blown back to the area I was plowing, I knew that I had to move the snow blower chute when I changed direction.

I finished plowing the back of my driveway in about 30 to 45 minutes. At least I got much of the snow off. And yes, some snow is back on my driveway. And I'll deal with that, if necessary, after the winds die down.

I hope to run my posts about the DC-3 with my next post this Wednesday.