New Tool

As some of you already know, I have resolved the first quandary, and chosen an electrician. Now it's a matter of waiting for RG&E to issue a work order number, so that my electrician can legally mess around with the riser cable and relocate the meters. Hopefully, this won't take more than about a week. But we are talking about a bureaucracy embedded within a monopoly, so …

In other news, we had a few inches of snow fall yesterday morning, so I went to the nearby hardware store to buy a snow shovel. It is a minor irritation to me that you can't get a straight-handled snow shovel anymore, unless you want the real bottom of the line one, or unless you want one of those ones that only pushes and doesn't scoop. So I bought the second-cheapest bent-handle model. Perhaps I'll look for something better somewhere down the road.

Why would anyone worry about upgrading this tool?

You should have seen the looks that I was getting from the passers-by in my new 'hood while I was shoveling. I couldn't decide whether they were wondering why anyone would care to do such a thorough job shoveling the driveway of a boarded-up house, or if it was more like, "Dude, this is Rochester. We don't shovel until it's at least a foot deep. And then we don't shovel. We have snow blowers."