❤️ Web

I’m a big fan of the web. Have been for over 30 years. Though I didn’t have access to my own computer, or the internet, until the late 1990’s I still remember the first time going online.

It was 1999 when I really became hooked. I was helping people at work get online and spending a lot of time there myself. Browsing the web and then learning to build for it and contribute to it. There was just so much information freely available.

There’s been so much that I’ve learned from the web over the years from blogs, forums, Wikipedia, YouTube, social media, and taking actual online courses. I take it for granted a lot most of the time now, but when I slow down ot think about it, it still amazes me.

Today was no exception. We haven’t even officially hit winter yet this year and we’ve had a lot of snow. My body has been sore for over a week now from shovelling and clearing snow away. A few years back I bought a new snow blower to help me with this and I have a strong love hate relationship with it.

When the machine works, it is a dream, but there have been so many times where it just hasn’t worked when I needed it to. With this one it’s typically been something simple, like shear pins broken. But when it’s freezing out and showing even that is a pain to change, even if I have any on hand.

Between the break downs and the amount of times we get just a little snow where it doesn’t make sense to use the snow blower. Our last big snowfall a couple of days ago fell into category of the snow blower not working. Shear pins were all fine, but the auger’s wouldn’t spin to throw snow. There wasn’t time to mess with it and at that point I didn’t even know where to start.

Today I realized were supposed to get more snow really soon so I should try to get this thing working again. To the web! Some reading led me to believe that it was likely the auger belt that was not working. With that information in hand YouTube came through with a video showing and explaining how to change it out.

I still wasn’t confident in my ability to get the thing apart and back together, but I searched and found a local store who had a new belt in stock so I went out and took the old belt out. I figured if I could get the old one off I should be able to get the new one on. After I got it off I went to the store and picked up a new belt, some extra shear pins just to be safe as well. Back home it took a bit more work to get the new belt on, but in the end I have working snow blower again and should be all set for this upcoming snow.

So thank you to the web, and in this case specifically donyboy73, for yet again teaching me something new and helping save me some money and my aching body.