Uncle Cran's Follow-Up Report

Uncle Cran with Frozen Jackhammer

Today's report from Uncle Cran opens with details of his performance as an ice-bound ice-breaker:

I scraped the 4 inches of snow off the concrete slab on the south side of the house, then used a shovel to break up the ice this morning. It measured different thicknesses, from 2-1/8 to 2-1/4 inches thick.

There's another of those uses of the pronoun "it" that Uncle Cran loves to employ, and since a pronoun usually refers back to the nearest noun, I infer that "It" refers back to "morning." Thus: "This morning measured different thicknesses, from 2-1/8 to 2-1/4 inches thick." I thought mornings were measured in hours, minutes, and seconds, but anyway, if I remember my math, 2 minus 1/8 equals 1 and 7/8, and 2 minus 1/4 equals 1 and 3/4, so Uncle Cran's morning was a bit uneven, though the difference is hardly worth mentioning. I don't know why Uncle Cran makes his farm reports so freaking complicated!

The only place I can break up the ice is where the sun is shining on the concrete.

I think Uncle Cran means he doesn't know his ice from a hole in the ground unless the light isn't where the sun don't shine. He is therefore only going to work in the sunlight. Primarily, that appears to mean that he's going to let Mother Nature solve the ice problem, as his following words show, a reasonable decision, I might add, since she's responsible for this problem, anyway.

There has been very little melting as the temperature gets to 7-9 degrees at night, and up to 34-36 degrees about noon.

The temperature is predicted to get higher the rest of the week, and the snow and ice should start melting more quickly.

There is a chance of rain on Friday, so that should really cause the stuff to melt.

By "stuff," Uncle Cran means "snow" and "ice." Let's call it "snice." As in: "It's snice out there."

Some readers might find my paronomasia funny. If so, stick around . . .