Slip Sliding away

Many of you recall Nicole's post the good, the bad, and the Russian, as a follow up to her conversation on Icy sidewalks here is a picture I took on the way to school showing a typical gauntlet faced on the sidewalks on our morning commutes.

Notice that most people walk on the side of the iced over sidewalk in a hunt for some traction, which only puts them perilously close to the street, or better yet the slope into the canal.

People would rather walk on the side of the sidewalk as the sidewalk itself is one solid sheet of ice, this is thanks to the street/sidewalk cleaner pictured below, notice the rotating brush on the back of it. You might think that this tool would effectively brush away loose snow and ice to leave a hazard free sidewalk.

In actuality this machine simply smoothes the ice, and melts the thinnest top layer of ice, think of it as the sidewalk Zamboni, removing anything that might have provided you some traction on the ice. These things come careening down the sidewalk at top speed, both Nikki and I have already been chased off a sidewalk or two by these "helpful" street cleaners.
In other news our car is now happily parked in its secured on street parking spot, about a 5 minute walk from the house. We took our first big trip to the big grocery store on the other side of town yesterday morning, all went well, except we bought a DVD player that only works with Russian DVDs, there's an expensive lesson in regional DVD copyrights.

Here is a photo of our car, I know it is dark, but this picture was taken at 3:30 in the afternoon, it is hard to plan all of our photos around the few hours of daylight we recieve. However it is definetly staying brighter longer each day!