Construction Equipment Owner

Spring is just around the corner, and with it comes my favorite sport. Baseball? NO. Concrete Canoeing!

The 2009 Concrete Canoe Competition will be held in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, June 11-13. Engineering students from universities all over the country will compete in canoe design and speed. Before the national competition takes place, however, concrete canoeists will compete in conference competitions in late March and early April. Check the schedule for a concrete canoe competition near you, then go out and cheer for your favorite team. I’ll be rooting for my home team, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Go Badgers!

Talk about dodging a bullet, as I write this Charlotte, NC, is getting blanketed (folks in Charlotte probably are saying “hammered”) with an unusually heavy late winter snowstorm. Charlotte has become a pretty easy city to get around in, whether you’re walking or driving, but a snowstorm like that (in Charlotte, Nashville, or any host city) would make it darn hard for NPE attendees to get out to dinners and for exhibitors to take prospects and customers out for a night on the town. So I’m happy NPE managed to get in out of Charlotte before the nasty weather hit. Maybe Show Director Loretta Miles put in a special request when she approved those Charlotte dates.

On the positive side of the late-season snow, contractors from the Mid-Atlantic states north up through the Northeast are having another opportunity to generate some early season cash flow as their snow removal fleets hit the roads. I talked with more than a dozen contractors at NPE who said this was one of the years where offering snow removal services was a real benefit to their company.

Even so, here’s hoping it’s the last “impact snowstorm” of the winter so that contractors can get their season started as soon as possible.