It’s a little cold around here too.
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Woah, that’s way too cold. Minus 9° F. Uggggh. Those are Alberta, Canada, temperatures, but not ones suitable for the middle of the U.S.
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Here in Toronto we’re having a week of -8ºC daytime high. Will improve after that.
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It’s going to be 35° F daytime high by friday. This is very temporary.
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It’s been in the 20’s and 30’s here. Full on sunshine today. We had a lot of snow a few days ago and then a long shower and it all washed away. Yesterday we had snow squalls.
This one happened in the afternoon. It came out of no where and was a complete white out. The wind was horrendous.
And literally 53 minutes later:
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Yeah, that squall blew thru right after I put out the recycling and it was cardboard week. Had to go chase the escapees. (unlike some of my neighbors that let their crap blow all over the neighborhood. grrr…)
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Yeah, neighbors not doing their share to keep up the neighborhood is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
It cannot decide what it wants to do here. One day it’s in the minus teens Celsius, the next it’s in the plus. It’s ridiculous, would rather it stay one way or the other, not all this up and down.
I had to have a chat with my cross the street neighbor’s snowplow service.
They were pushing the snow up her driveway, across the street and into my yard! WTF! I was polite about it and even told him he could push it down the street a bit farther on our property down there. But don’t scrape up the grass, rip up the shrubbery, or leave it where the town plow will push it into my driveway.
That and their neighbor’s leaves blowing into the yard. They didn’t rake all season. Just let it blow across the street into mine. I got a big leaf sucker for the lawnmower. Was sorely tempted to dump them back in their driveway. But they’d probably call the cops.
Wah.
It’s snowing today. But it’s winter, I suppose.
I can’t remember where I read the news story a couple of months ago, but it was about a couple of neighbors who got into a gunfight over that very thing. There was also the weird incident where U.S. Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky was ambushed and beaten by his neighbor over something similar.
This past fall, I bought a big, noisy, gasoline-powered, two-stroke leaf blower. I’ve never had so much fun cleaning up the yard, although I’m sure the neighbors hated the noise. There was something emotionally gratifying about blasting giant piles of leaves into the air and herding them around the yard.
I have a backpack leaf blower, and it is actually a lot of fun. The really nice thing about it is that it cuts a job that used to take two or three hours down to thirty or forty minutes. It works really well on dry snows, too. My next door neighbors are super nice (not the kind of neighbors I complain about). I was out the other night blowing snow off of our driveway and decided I’d go ahead and take a couple of minutes and blow our neighbor’s driveway too since I was already out.
You mentioned your leaf blower last fall, which is what inspired me to get one. Thanks! 
I was tempted to blow the powder snow off our driveway, but I had already drained the fuel from the tank and carburetor and fogged the engine for storage. I’m still tempted, though.
Did it work well, or did it mostly just blow a big cloud of uncontrollable snow into the air?
You’re welcome!
It worked very well – especially if you work with the wind. Honestly, I had some fuel left in the tank from the end of fall that I was wanting to use up. That’s part of the reason I used it on the snow – and part of the reason I did the neighbor’s driveway to completely drain the tank and carb.
Maybe I’m just stupid, but I’ve never gotten the hang of a leaf blower. I can never get it to do anything but spread them around even more than they already are.
becomes <leaves everywhere else I don’t want them, including where they already were>
It took me a little practice, but I grew up on a ranch and found it similar to herding sheep. Anticipate where they want to go, walk back and forth at the rear while gradually moving forward, send the dog over to flank them before they begin scattering off into separate bunches, drive them hard sometimes, or pull back to gently avoid spooking them at others. Our dog wasn’t much help with the leaves, but you get the point. 
I also watched a YouTube video or two on it (leaves, not sheep), which helped.
I’ve only seen leaf blowers on tv cartoons, lol. I think it’ll be fun to use, but we don’t need it one bit here. Our trees don’t shed leaves in winter.
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Yeah, I have a 2-stroke backpack leaf blower too. Towns around here are starting to ban them or allowing use only during weekdays, not weekends. Guess I’ll have to take a few days off work to do leaves if they do that.
I was out doing the snowblower last night and wondering when the Green People were going to come for that stuff too. My snowblower, leaf blower, lawn tractor, wood stove, propane emergency generator and my gas grill. It’s only a matter of time…
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Mine is a handheld electric cordless that runs on the same batteries as my edger, trimmer and mower, so it isn’t especially loud.
I might have to do that, I suppose. We don’t get thick layers of fallen leaves, but the windy nature of the region lends to them eventually accumulating in corners and along fences. By the time I get to them, they’re usually damp or still wet at the bottom half of the pile, so scooping is sometimes the only solution to clearing them out.
You don’t think they’d come for pontoon boat motor, do you? 
Hard to row that thing.
Yeah, leaf blower practicality depends on which way the wind is blowing. You have to tack like a sailboat to go upwind, otherwise you get more behind you than ahead of you.
If you’ve got $20k lying around collecting dust…
Can’t run a gas motor on our lake, so I got a much lower power / lower cost outboard from Elco, and it’s really nice.