Some times my good neighbors are too good

We recently had the first snow fall that required shoveling. So yesterday I shoveled the driveway. I'm one of the weird ones who actually enjoys shoveling snow by hand. I have a hand me down snow blower that I've only used once or twice. For a desk jockey like myself, it's a good excuse to get outside and some exercise.

Although I don't always get to shovel my driveway. My neighbors across the street have ATVs. They plow their driveway with their bigger ATV that they attached a plow to every winter. I have to admit it looks like a much more fun way to plow snow. It is in fact a fun way, because my neighbor will plow mine for the fun of it, if he beats me to it.

The first time I shovel the driveway, I have to do a little bit of planning. I need to make sure I shovel a little more space than I need. I do this because if we get a lot of snow, eventually the banks on the side of my driveway will get too high to shovel over easily, and the drive way will end up getting narrower.

I want to not only keep it wide enough for my vehicles, but wide enough for the propane truck, UPS truck, and hopefully never needed but just in case fire trucks. But this year I had an additional strategy to work in.

The garbage collection service I have is by far the cheapest option I have. They are pretty good over all, but the driver on my route is well, not their best. Since my neighbors and I are the last stops on our road for him, he used to turn around in my neighbors yard, instead for driving a few minutes  to the next intersection and turning around there. I get it. The extra minutes add up on a route.

The problem was he started to tear up their driveway, so the politely complained. After that, he started turning around in my driveway. For whatever reason, my requests for him to stop have gone unanswered.

So I figured this winter I could break his habit for him. The guy isn't the best at backing up, so I angled the banks at the end of the drive to make it a little more challenging to back the garbage truck into. But I still made it so a firetruck or delivery truck would be able to drive forward into without much trouble.

Some times my good neighbors are too good. He opened up my driveway a little more for me with his ATV.