Sounds like damn near anyone except maybe Paul Bunyan would be. 
Congrats on making it work for you. Skill and determination are a wonderful thing. As is a youthful capable body no matter your actual age.
I was visiting Central New York when I met my wife in the Finger Lakes region.
This happened, so I drove up to see and appreciate it:
In some ways, a dusting in San Diego has as much impact as a dump of lake effect snow in Western NY, primarily because the former has no equipment, experience or processes to deal with it while the latter … it’s just Thursday
I stood on the roof of my SUV and still couldn’t see over the piles from the snowplows. It was both eerie and memorably quiet.
And … yeah … then we skied in it 
Thanks, we have it pretty well figured out. Lot’s of missteps of course. You CAN get a 4x4 chained up on all 4 wheels stuck in snow. Oh yeah you can. Been there done that. Of course, at that point you are pretty much screwed no matter how you look at it. The winch on the back helps. Provided you can go backwards to get out…
We figure we have another 10 years or so up here. We have no clue where we will go but will probably stay in Colorado. To far off to plan.
Yikes. Luckily we rarely get more than 2 feet in a dump.
The thing with lake effect snow is that it’s very localized. The wind gathers up moisture from the lake and then dumps all of it as snow as soon as it hits land. This means lakeside cities like Buffalo and Watertown get hit with massive amounts of snow.
But those of us living inland get only minor amounts of snow. Because it all fell in Buffalo. I live about sixty miles east of Buffalo and we got about an inch of snow.
I actually come from western NY, and grew up where a 9 foot snow fall over a several day blizzard was not uncommon.
I have mentioned it here before [not going to search for it] but in 1990 mrAru and I were encouraged to move here by the US Navy [well, move or courtsmartial … =) ] and we heard that OHMYGODABLIZAARDISCOMING so we did the fair thing for a pair that had mothers that grew up in the midwest during the great Depression, and then for me at least grew up in an area with snow. We shopped. And not for a 'French Toast Emergency [buy milk, eggs, bread and toilet paper, though we tend to remain stocked up on those items anyway] We bought such foods as I could easily prepare on our wood stove - me having learned to cook on a woodstove =) And durable stuff, so it could weather out our pantry for a while. I got ingredients for my vegan minestrone [canned whole plum tomatoes, dentili pasta, the onions we expected to use either way, seasonings, dried beans and so forth. ] Also got the french toast makings, as I do like french toast anyways. Flour can always end up as scones or biscuits, bread, pancakes and such. We got a whopping inch or two. I didn’t get a snow day unless there was at least 6 inches during an overnight - everybody back home would have fallen off their sled at a mere couple inches.
It’s amazing how different the snow situation is here on the opposite side of Lake Ontario from Buffalo, which appears to be at the center of the heaviest snowfall. There’s about a 30% chance of some light dusting, with no measurable accumulation at all noted in the forecast. Winds are westerly. It’s not obvious why the big snowfall is all on the southern shore and elsewhere in western New York state. I believe it’s been like that in other years, too.
Anytime you get warning of a natural disaster heading your way, the first thing you should do is make sure you have enough maple syrup to see you through.
Very smart.
Admitting that some day you too will be too old for that much work is very hard for a lot of people. I’ve heard about some real tragedies from folks too proud / stubborn / unimaginative to admit the time had come (or worse had come and long since gone) for them to move to a less demanding & more forgiving situation.
MIO admitting it (aging) can happen to you is the hardest battle of them all. Denial is one of humans’ strongest traits.
You misspelled “vodka and Caesar mix”. 
If you run out of everything else, a steady diet of Caesars provides solid nutrition including the omega-3 fatty acids and important vitamins and minerals inherent in seafood from the clam juice, the nutritional qualities of vegetables from the tomato juice, and the psychological benefits of vodka and the endorphin rush from the hot spices. There is no more perfect food, so an ample supply is always in my home emergency kit!
Making french toast the wolfpup way:
- Four parts caesar mix
- One part vodka
- Add ice
- Raise glass
- “To Charles de Gaulle”
- Drink
Yeah, I work from home now so at least I can plow in the daylight now. Don’t have to leave my car in the ‘road’ and hike up the drive.
Still, it’s going to be too much. I’m 61 years old, in good shape but no spring chicken. One thing I don’t have is denial of aging. Nor does my wife.
This is sort of off subject, but I ALWAYS did all my own repairs and remodels. I got to the point of saying to heck with it and now hire people. That was hard. Getting them to come here can be even harder.
Here in Toronto it’s always a roll of the dice as to how brutal the winter will be for driving. We had our first big snowfall on Tuesday afternoon and a lot of it’s receded. However, a huge weather pattern (I think I saw the word squall once or twice) is heading towards the Golden Horseshoe and word is the Niagara Region is going to get utterly buried.
I grew up in Ottawa which is colder than Toronto in the winter, with more snow (or it has been, within my lifetime). I actually did my drivers ed in the middle of an Ottawa winter: a newbie driver learning on black ice, through blowing drifts and low-visibility and snowbanks in the middle of the road…I took my driving test in April and everything after that was Christmas. But I still can’t stand the extreme cold. Toronto’s got about two weeks in late April and elevn days straddling September and October that are comfortable for me, and the rest of the time I’m either sweating buckets or shivering.
This past January the city was absolutely pummeled overnight with more than a foot of snow and it ground the city to a halt, basically. It was literally weeks before al the streets could get plowed. This year the city doesn’t want to be caught unawares, and they’ve allocated a lot more money and equipment, and have already started salting the streets enough to dissolve people’s shoes, if you believe the complaining headlines.
How do I personally deal with it? It’s pretty to look at through the window.
You almost got it right, except step (5) does not exist. You have perhaps mistaken me for a resident of Quebeckistan.
I was once, actually. I love good French toast. Mom used to make it in our summer cottage over a wood-burning stove with thick-sliced French bread and real maple syrup from a local little village in Quebec.
But the makings of a Caesar are an essential part of my home emergency survival kit, along with flashlights, a battery power pack for recharging my cell phone, and some emergency vermouth-pickled olives for making vodka martinis.
Are you a Letterkenny fan? If so, I’m sure you enjoyed the one episode from the latest (last?) season in which the townsfolk had a Caesar-making contest. Here’s a link where somebody recreated the Caesars from the show.
Can’t see a Caesar and not want to seize 'er!
Then where’s the French toast?
I get your point. But we toast Walter Chell, the Greatest Canadian™, who invented the Caesar in Calgary in 1969.
Reminds me a bit of one recipe for the ideal dry martini:
The bartender adds the gin into the shaker of ice, faces Italy and salutes, then shakes the gin to chill, then pours.
Westernish MI. We’re getting hammered with lake effect snow. We don’t get more than a couple of feet usually, but we’re getting it fast. What really annoys the hell out of me is it was 70+ degrees here one week ago today. I hate winter. We get a lot of black ice and people that think because they have a 4 wheel drive they can drive 65 on icy roads. Idiots.
My driveway is short. I usually use the run and gun technique of backing out. I do have an electric snow blower just in case.
I just told my husband that I was NOT shoveling snow at work this weekend. I’m 63, there are many younger people perfectly capable of shoveling. Thankfully, the company now has the plow guys do the city sidewalks (that the city refuses to clear different rant). We (as in me on several occasions) used to do 4 blocks of sidewalk. The last time I swore I wouldn’t do it again 'cause I felt like the tin man with no oil for days. Did I mention how much I HATE winter. grumble