Since I didn’t have to go in to work this morning, I went to take the neighbor-dog-down-the-road, Maya, on a walk. We took a long walk, and I let her run off the leash (well, not holding the leash) some.
We were almost back to her house, when we met Pat, the road-grading lady. She was clearing some of the slush from the road. This gave me some optimism about the intended mid-day trip-to-town that Arthur and I always do on Thursday.
After dropping Maya back at her house, walking back to my house, I saw Pat had stopped. She was having problems with chains, too (like I did yesterday – see last night’s blog-post).
I spent about 2 hours trying to help her and her husband Fred, who drove up the road to help, while we tried to repair the chain problem – it had broken. I ended up dragging the chain (very heavy – these are chains for big tires) down into Arthur’s shop and we used a bench-mounted heavy-duty vice and a sledge hammer to knock a few of the links in the tire chain back into the right alignment. Then we took the chain back up to the road-grader and re-installed it on the tire.
Pat was then able to finish grading the road out to the 5-mile bridge, which made Arthur’s and my commute into town somewhat easier, though we still went very slow, taking almost 45 minutes each way, instead of the more typical 25 minute drive.
