Chipping ice

Now that the big snow has gone away and temperatures have been warming up into the low 40s, I've started working on chipping at the ice that covers our driveway and path to the front porch. It's a slow, tedious process of sprinkling ice melt on the ice, waiting for it to work and soften/thin the ice, then hacking at it with a shovel and throwing the blocks of ice that are loosened. Repeat. Some of the ice is thin, but there are places where it can be four inches thick, and those don't chip away. I have to leave those behind and hope that they will eventually melt away enough to be chippable. I suppose I could go and obtain a large pick axe...

One would think that once the temps get above freezing the ice would go away, but it doesn't work that way. They just stick around. The only way to speed up the process is to break the ice apart so that when (and that's a rare "when") the sun shines, the darker ground warms up and helps speed up the melting. Dry conditions and high winds also assist by evaporating the melting vapors. However we've been getting rain rather than sun or wind. Rain does not help at all. It just sticks with the ice and makes everything much more slippery.

So that's the start of my week.