Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Failure as a Tutor

 I live in the Northeast Ohio snow belt. We get an average annual snowfall of 110". It really varies year to year, though. Last year we had a couple heavy snow accumulations, but barely enough to go cross country skiing.

Yesterday we got blasted with 24" of snow overnight. It was heavy wet snow that stuck to trees and broke limbs and snapped trunks and bowed saplings to the ground. The woods that surrounds our house is unrecognizable. The snow is knee deep and the younger trees are all bent over in large snowy arches.

The cold stresses all the infrastructure too. The coaxial cable for our internet service came down. Our house lost power, too, for about 24 hours. We have a backup generator, and that was the first time it was used, but we had no internet for most of the time, too. The cellular data network seems to be sensitive to power outages too.

Our duck pen roof failed, too. It became loaded with snow, which is extremely unusual. The roof is just some galvanized fencing that lays over a lattice of 2x4s that span between 2 main beams that are supported with posts.

The fence material has holes that are 2" wide and 4" long, so there's plenty of room for snow to fall through. One of the 2x4's in the middle cracked when I was trying to shake the snow off. The rest of the roof held, though, so it was actually pretty "easy" to repair. In the failure it became really easy to see how to improve the central portion of  the roof so it's much stronger.

Failure is more of a proof of Nature and God than success. It's really a chance to improve and learn, which seems to be why we are here.

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