adrian_turtle

I was driving to a job interview this morning, waiting at the traffic jam at route 2 and I-95, when the car behind me hit a patch of black ice. I'm not hurt (for extremely uncomfortable values of "not hurt," which the nice doctor in the emergency room defined as "no broken bones, no internal bleeding, no organ damage.") The car was very badly hurt. I didn't get a good look at the damage, but I think it's the kind of thing that makes them call a 1997 car a total loss.

I talked to the recruiter. She will try to reschedule the interview for a somewhat less appalling morning.

I want a good way to clear snow off my car and the surrounding pavement without hurting myself.

1. I have considered the traditional strategy of waiting for spring, or at least for the kind of good thaw we see every week or so around here. But these days I have a babysitting job one or two afternoons a week. It's not a big deal for me to walk the 1.5 miles from the child's preschool to her home, but it would be a very big deal for her. I'm fairly confident those short legs could NOT do it in significant snow. So that strategy is out.

1a. The people who own my apartment building recently sent out flyers announcing that all tenants must remove their cars from the parking lot when it snows, so they can have the lot plowed. Insofar as they want the cars to be safe from snowplows, I understand...but if it's snowing and the plows have not been out, moving my car is difficult and painful and scary, and I don't wanna.

2. If I lived in a house with a driveway, I would hire somebody to shovel the driveway and clear the snow off my car. I don't have a driveway. My building has a parking lot with 40 places. The lot gets plowed, and the walkways get shoveled, but I'm responsible for clearing the snow and ice off my own car. Is it possible to hire somebody just to do that?

3. I've done some shoveling in emergency situations, since the hand pain got really bad. Most shoveling jobs are so big, so difficult, so brutally painful, that it's really pretty easy for me to make the decision about doing it. No. Don't do it. Not unless it would save a life. (In practice, I am pretty easy to manipulate when people I love need help getting to hospitals or staying out of prison. And I do any number of things I probably shouldn't, when I think it will help me keep my job.) It's still relatively easy to see I should not be shoveling, that spending the extra money for this apartment with the plowed lot was a good idea.

4. Clearing snow off the car itself is not as painful as shoveling snow from the ground.* There's less snow involved, and a person doesn't have to lift it. When the snow is very light, I clear a lot of it by hand (well, with my big waterproof mitten), so I don't have to grip anything. I can't reach nearly as close to the middle of the Boat of Gold as I could with the little blue car. So there is a lot more gripping of tools (hand strain) and reaching up and across (shoulder strain). There is some pain when I'm doing it, and more pain afterwards...probably aggravated by the fact that I clear the snow off the car and then get right in the car and go for a stressful drive on snowy roads.

5. I took the car to the new occupational therapist (who seems not to be a complete idiot), and asked her advice about clearing snow off it with minimal pain and damage. She recommended using a stepstool to reach the top of the car without raising my arm above shoulder height, adjusting my grip on the tools to keep my wrists in line with my arms, and moving snow in small increments. I hope this will help. I haven't tried it yet. It seems like it would make the job take much longer, and I don't know the relative value of "fewer movements straining the joint" vs "each movement putting less strain on the joint."

6. I selected my snow-clearing tools for their light weight, and for being able to move snow from the center of my little blue car without my needing to apply much lateral force. I did NOT go looking for handles that would make it easy to keep one's wrists in line with one's arms.
My current favorite snow-clearing tool is a red plastic toy snow shovel that looks just like the one I had when I was 6, right down to the little triangular handle.
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Snow-Shovel/dp/B001KMTVO8
If I'm not wearing gloves or mittens, I can (just barely) fit my fingers into the triangle of the handle. This lets me hold the shovel more or less horizontal, to push snow off the hood or trunk, using my fingers and palms, without engaging my bad thumb or twisting either wrist sideways. All as the OT advised, except that spending an hour or two with bare hands in the snow would probably counter any positive effects. In practice, I usually end up grabbing the stick part.
My brush/scraper thingee looks approximately like this:
http://www.autobarn.net/telsnow.html
Only it doesn't extend. It's about 30" long, with a foam-padded straight handle. The OT watched me hold it in one hand, and both, reaching over the car. She pointed out how I was twisting my wrists, and I experimented with various grips. The least bad seems to be with both thumbs up, and thumbs aligned with the handle...but that's not *good*. It's just hard for me to keep a good grip and maintain control of a linear tool, especially if it's long.

7. Can any of you recommend implements for clearing snow off a car that have some kind of crosspiece on the handle, making it easier to push and pull? Overall lightness is still useful. With this car, I think a long handle, or an extensible handle, would be good.


*Because clearing off the car is so much less painful than shoveling, it's actually more difficult to decide whether I should be doing it. When. How much. It hurts a lot. I can push through the pain, but there is a substantial physical cost I have to pay for days (sometimes weeks.) The work needs to be done--not in the sense of saving a life, but in the more usual way of work needing to be done.

I am contemplating a used car with the sort of ridiculously low mileage my old car used to have. This car used to be owned by an old man who only drove it on Sundays, in good weather, when he wasn't in the nursing home. I borrowed it for a few days last year (from his granddaughter), when my car was being repaired, so I know it's relatively easy on my shoulder. And quiet, bless its internal combustion engine! There are so many things about driving I find stressful, but part of what makes it difficult for me is trying to cope with the road noise. Cranking up the stereo so I can hear the words of an audiobook is nothing like so good as actual quiet.

This car spent a lot of time in a garage, safe from snowplows and other hazards. It has summer tires, which really ought to change before I rely on it in bad weather. (It has rear-wheel drive, and I could feel the wheels slipping sideways a bit on hills when I drove it a short distance last week.) The previous owner suggested snow tires, which seem problematic. How do people in small apartments store out-of-season tires? It occurred to me after WAY too much angst that this is likely to be a problem for lots of people, completely unrelated to anyone being tidy or organized or strong or sensible. Are all-season tires as good? Almost as good? Can any of you recommend a particular kind of tires, or a place to buy them? (After last winter, I have some idea of where not to buy them, but that doesn't narrow it down much.)

...considering how important that car isn't. It's never pleasant to wake up to police officers ringing the doorbell (even when they are polite, and even when it's 11am.) Early this morning, a snowplow hit my car and knocked it sideways down the icy slope of the parking lot. The police wanted to give me the accident report, which includes the snowplow's insurance information. There is quite a lot of damage, including a missing window, and I don't know if the car is drivable. I am not brave enough to try.

I buy my insurance through Dan, a friendly and helpful insurance agent in Somerville. The actual insurance company that collects most of the money (minus a commission for Dan) and presumably pays claims is a huge corporation I've never dealt with, other than sending them checks and reading some of their boilerplate. The corporation has a phone number they claim is available for reporting claims 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They say customers are required to file claims as soon as possible. When I called the number, I got a recording that they were closed for the holiday; to file a new claim, hang up and call [same number I had just called.]

So I called Dan's office in Somerville. Dan answered the phone, which was surprising. He was friendly and helpful, which was not. He's sorry about my car being damaged. He'll deal with the insurance company for me. He'll have an adjuster call me and make an appointment to assess the damage, before having it repaired. Apparently, the insurance company needs to have one of their employees (or maybe contractors) check things out before they can agree to pay for it. Dan suggested I have the window glass repaired in place. This may or may not make the car drivable, but it will prevent further damage if it can be done before the rain starts tomorrow. He gave me the number of a local place that repairs car windows.

The car window repair dispatcher talked about the damage, and started to set up an appointment to fix it. Then she asked about the status of the insurance claim. She warned me that if they repair the window glass before the insurance adjuster does the damage report, the all the claims for structural damage can be denied (not just the glass damage part.) Yet if I wait, and don't do anything until the insurance adjuster is available Monday, the inside of the car will be soaked. If they don't want people acting without authorization, the people with authority had damn well better carry pagers. Even on weekends. Even on Boxing Day. *Somebody* should even be available on Yom Kippur, for crying out loud. Accidents happen all the time, even if snowplow-related accidents only happen a few months out of the year.

I am very upset. Can anybody local help? I have no idea if it's possible to drive the thing to a garage (if I had the garage, or the driving skills, because I think it's marginal), or to pallet wrap it somehow? This is way beyond my experience as well as my physical ability.