Several of us were at church this morning digging out the driveway and enough of the parking lot that people could be dropped off in front of the church.  Two inches of hard, tight ice is difficult to remove.  While we were getting organized and the guys who were going to be using the rental frontloader were figuring out how to use it, I did a little photography.

The frontloader was equipped with a device on the back with large teeth.  The idea was that the teeth would break through the ice and as it was pulled along, the ice would come up.  The ice was not impressed.

So several of us attacked the ice with pickaxes, shovels, etc. while a snowplow on a garden tractor, a soil cultivator and the frontloader all peeled back the ice a little bit at a time.

Various ideas were proposed, including building a 10 foot wide parabolic mirror to focus the rays of the sun on the ice and drilling holes in the ice and loading them with M-80 fireworks.  Then we went back to work with the pickaxes and the shovels.

All this photography, by the way, was done before we got organized.

There is an abandoned house next to the church.  It called.  I answered.

If you are wondering when I will quit obsessing with impressionistic painting techniques, the answer is I don’t know.

I’m enjoying it though.  I hope I’m not as stiff in the morning as I am now.