Breaking the ice

This is not about smoothing over some awkward little moment at the start of a Christmas party. This is about hard physical effort.

From my on-line dictionary:

slog
verb
... they were all slogging away. WORK HARD, toil, labor, work one's fingers to the bone, work like a Trojan/dog, exert oneself, grind, slave, grub, plow, plod, peg; (informal) beaver, plug, work one's guts out, put one's nose to the grindstone, sweat blood; travail; (archaic) drudge, moil. (antonym) relax.

I mentioned in yesterday's blog post that everything outside has acquired a layer of ice. Today at the Rockcliffe Flying Club we became an ice breaking crew, trying to get rid of it. The new hangar, its floor measuring over 2800 square feet, has to be erected a.s.a.p. (because the old one is ... let's just say past its best). The replacement construction already has a metal frame, roof and back wall and since this afternoon, the wooden framework for another wall as well, but before our indomitable volunteers (Chris among them, hammer and nails at the ready) could build this, the floor had to be restored to normality by means of shovels, spades, brushes and wheelbarrows. I could almost have added, pickaxes. Indeed, we looked like a party of convicts sentenced to years of hard labour in some frozen in Siberia. There were my normally ladylike friends wielding a sledgehammer (until Don told us to desist in case we broke the concrete as well as the ice).

It's satisfying to have got rid of so much ice and snow in one day, but as we were working, I kept thinking of The Walrus and The Carpenter who

... wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"
"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

I know I ought to have taken a proper photo to illustrate this post, but forgot to take my camera along. To give some idea of its size, here's a picture of the hangar under construction in milder weather a few weeks ago. (Click to enlarge.)

Tonight more snow will blow through the open spaces in windy gusts of 35 knots, so they say. I hope this doesn't mean that we'll have to do the same amount of work again tomorrow, because, as my grandmother used to put it, "my bones ache." The temperature is forecast to drop to minus 16 and it will "feel like" minus 24 in the morning.