No Good Deed Goes Without Consequence

But My Driveway is Open

I finally went down to the Operating Engineers facility down the road to talk to them to see if perhaps they could help me get my second driveway open.

Sure enough, in the early afternoon a huge front end loader arrived and started to work.  This thing has tires as tall as I am as it's heavy construction equipment.

Unfortunately, under the snow is a layer of packed snow/ice stuff and my driveway has a hill.  Several times, the machine started to sideslip when the snow was built up in front of it. But, he managed to get the driveway open.

OK. great. But then he came through again to try to clean up some more of the snow at the end of the drive, and disaster. The machine started to slide, lost traction and skidded over to the left, hanging itself up right next to that fence post you see.  Now this huge thing was stuck in my driveway. The photo below is before he got stuck.

Well, he put in a call to the garage and soon, another huge front end loader appeared to pull him out. 

Loader #1 was a John Deere and Loader #2 was a Caterpillar, for those who appreciate fine construction equipment.  It didn't take too much to get the first loader out as it was not stuck in much snow, just slipped off the edge so he couldn't get any traction. 

Anyhow, safe and sound, loader one headed out the slippery slope driveway and loader #2, pictured here, turned around and headed back out the other driveway.  To get an idea of the size of these things, that door in the garage behind the machine is my regular garage door where I drive the car and truck in and out. 

Off they went. 

But there is always a price to pay. In this case, my fence and the drive through gate:

The fence post can be reset, and I already did a half baked job of that. The gate?  Bent to smithereens. 

I am hoping that if I get the gate off the pole, I can take it to the school where I used to teach and the welding shop can straighten it out for me. If by some chance it breaks when they try to bend it back, they can weld it back together.

Otherwise I am going to have to buy a new one, and that's not cheap.

The Boys have been out in the pasture a little and have made some paths around the paddocks. Mostly they seem to think standing in the run in is the best place to be.  I don't blame them.

I dug a path from the now open driveway to the house where my electric meter and the connections for my cable are.  I've been having some intermittent breaks in Internet/Phone service and Comcast informed me there is a weak signal coming in for those services--the cable TV is fine. Could be the connected from the pole, something down the road, or the connection to the house.  At least the service guy can get to it if it is at the house.

Right now, the tractor repair truck is in the backyard, and the guy is working on the tractor. We should be up and running again soon.  Not sure how the little guy would have done with the snow in the second driveway, considering how much trouble the big machine had with the ice. If I'd slid the Kubota into the snow, I'd be in a real pickle, so maybe this time it's just as well the big guys came to help out.

It might have cost me a fence and a gate, but that's repairable. The tractor or my getting hurt?  Not worth it.

UPDATE!!  The tractor is fixed.  And just about five minutes ago, a pickup truck came in and took my broken gate and fencepost away. The guy from the Operating Engineers took it upon himself to take it to see if he could fix it!!

Unbelievable! It was a total accident and he did not have to go out of his way like that to try to fix the thing.

WOW!!! Hope it works, but if not, we'll be fine anyhow. I am just blown away by his kindness.