Snow load

John and I spent this afternoon shoveling snow and damn near killing ourselves. Unfortunately, my Dad is enroute to FL and could not plow us out, so we were left to shovel. We were rescued by a neighbor with a snowblower, which is probably the only reason I didn't have to call an ambulance for John. This storm was just too much for us (John with arthritis, me with little strength) to handle with  shovels.  Some pics of our shoveling duties:

John clears a path with the snow scoop down our driveway to the street. It didn't drift as much here as other places.

A good foot of snow, though. Thankfully not wet and heavy, but still a struggle.

John's truck misses its old SoCal home

Snow had drifted around 3' high. It was halfway up my thighs as I walked around the truck.

Storms with this much snow are becoming more rare in SJ, but they do still happen.  With my Dad spending more time in FL, we're on our own to get our driveway cleared.  Today happened to be a non-working day, which meant we weren't having to juggle working with clearing, but that also meant it pretty much took over our day off, and now we're tired and useless (though I'm still powering through my laundry duties).  The way I see it, we have a few choices:

1. Buy a snowblower.  Pro: will clean driveway with less back-breaking effort.  Cons: Limited place to store it since our garage is small and our barn far enough away from the main driveway to make it awkward. Also still involves standing out in snow for hours to clear.
2. Learn how to plow and keep Dad's truck at our house when he's away.  Pro: Definitely easier to clear, we can sit in the comfort of the truck and push major amounts of snow out of the way with minimal physical effort.  Cons: We don't have as much experience as Dad and could break the truck, have an accident, wreck the lawn, etc.  Also limited parking arrangements -- would we store one of our vehicles at Dad's while we have his truck at our place?  Would we just park the plow truck in front of John's truck and play musical vehicles for a while?
3. Move to a different house with a 2 car garage so at least we didn't have to dig a vehicle out during each storm.
4. Move to a different house in a much warmer climate where snow is a novelty.

We have some thinking to do.  Already we've received tougher storms than last year, but at least we were plowed out for last week's storm.  We can't keep shoveling if we keep getting these amounts of snow, though. This storm was a lighter, fluffy snow.  I can only imagine how back-breaking it would have been had the snow been wet and heavy.