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icy driveway hell
Thursday, February 20 2025
Our Chevy Bolt had been stuck for days in the driveway, with each of its four tires sitting at the bottom of wells of ice that had built up around them. This morning I thought I'd try a new technique to extract it. So I gathered a five gallon bucket of chips of bark and wood from the bottom of the woodshed and dumped this material into the wells around the two front tires, hoping it would provide the traction necessary to get the car up out of the ice wells. It did not.
So then I tried another trick. I jacked up both of the front wheels and put pieces of two by sixes under them. The only jack I had that would fit beneath the car was a scissor jack, and the hardware for turning the screw was janky at best, causing great frustration. (I would later try to turn that screw with a cordless drill, but it didn't have anywhere near enough torque.) As I worked on this, Gretchen came out and recommended sprinkling salt on the ice. I didn't think this would work, since it would take too long to erode the ice at the back tires and just add to the slipperiness at the front tires. Of course, I hadn't eaten anything yet, so I said something really mean instead of what I should've said, but I didn't feel like explaining what I was thinking to someone who wasn't going to belleve me and had what I thought was irrational faith in a product (in this case, ice salt).
When I tried to drive with the wheels up on the pieces of wood, it seemed at first like it might be possible. But then one of the pieces of wood got shot out from under the wheel like a projectile from a rail gun. After that, there was no traction. (The problem with unlocked differentials is that if one wheel is spinning freely, the other wheel receives zero power.) I ended up jacking up that wheel and putting a piece of wood under it a second time, only to shoot that one at out as well. I found, though, that it was generally possible to pull a board under the tire just by placing it up against it. The problem was to keep it from being pulled all the way through. To avoid this, I needed to use the stiffest, longest board possible. Meanwhile I'd told Gretchen it was okay if she dumped ice salt around the back tires, and that, along with some chipping at the ice, made the slope of the well walls gentle enough for the the car to eventually find its way out. I then parked the Bolt at the end of the driveway after first moving the Subaru Forester (which was also having trouble finding traction) over to the side of the Farm Road.
During a pause in all that aggravation, I took Neville to the Pretty Pet Parlor to have his nails trimmed.
This afternoon I had a Zoom meeting with a bank employee back in Staunton about a CD (or perhaps IRA) I was inheriting from my mother. I didn't know if it was $2,000 or $200,000. The reason for using Zoom was so that I could prove that I was indeed the person I was claiming to be. The upshot of the call was that I am inheriting $77,000, but that is before taxes, so the actual number is probably going to be closer to $50,000. To keep from being taxed on it all in one year, I was told it was probably best to put it in some sort of special account to be drawn down slowly so as not to push my taxes up into an unnecessarily high bracket.
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