OK, which of you did it? Confess. I know you're squirming right now, because you know you're the one who ruined spring.
You put away the snowblower too early.
Note: At the time of this writing, the Weather Service was predicting a torrential rainstorm, changing to typhoons, followed by hail the size of bowling balls and 16 feet of snow. We have become inured to these apocalyptic predictions and tend to take them with a grain of salt, especially when the hail turns out to be the size of a grain of salt.
But if we do get hit, and the city looks like January, it'll be the fault of everyone who decided it was safe to put away the snowblower.
First, of course, you have to prepare the snowblower for its hibernation. A snowblower engine can be a touchy, colicky thing. According to my owner's manual, I must constantly anoint its innards with new gasoline, preferably obtained at the refinery to ensure peak freshness; any elderly gas will cause its delicate system to gunk up, and then you will have to disassemble the entire engine and scrub all the parts with a small metal brush. This often leads to a process called "buying another one."
Or, you could do what my last engine-repair guy did: Spray the motor with gas and set it on fire. That got the engine running again, although it might have been out of sheer terror.
Anyway. I was going to put my snowblower away, but a few storms ago it started gargling tar, choked and died. Fresh fuel didn't work. The oil was so fresh you could hear a dinosaur weep if you put your ear to the container. A can of the engine-reviving stuff didn't work; it was like pouring coffee down a corpse's throat.
But I still had to drain it before I put it away, and that's like milking a cow by picking it up, turning it over and aiming the teat-stream at a bucket.
