Put On Your Boots
Along with much of the US, we got some snow recently, enough to close schools for a day and then last into the weekend.
Like most American cities, including LA, Chicago, and even New York City, you can walk a short distance and see the streetscape change radically. At first you might be among old attached houses and newer, huge apartment buildings.
This is where you’ll find a lot of bars, some of them trying to lure in a few customers with unexpected time on their hands.
And then a short distance away there’s an old cemetery on a hillside.
People took advantage of the snow to make tiny snowmen, like this one on a stump…
…and this one on a cafe table where it would be the only one waiting for service.
Into the Woods
Much like Chicago or New York, you can be walking in a busy business and residential area and then only a short distance away find yourself in the woods. This is a culvert which is a reminder of earlier, more industrial times when a railroad ran over the stream.
Nearby there’s an old stone wall that borders an alley, in a sort of mashup of multiple Robert Frost poems.
A cross country skier must have come through here…
… and then, sure enough, the skier showed up.
During warmer weather, this brick path gets a lot of foot traffic…
… but after the snowstorm, you could barely see it.
dude on my shift would make those little snowmen
and someone on the other shift would murder them every break
the other shifts keeping mum about who the snowcopath is……. tho we have our suspicions
anyways….. next snow….expect boobytrapped snowmen
Just decapitate them, or kill them in creative ways?
well…we try to avoid lethal measures
but we are just dumb blue collar grunts and as such physical harm is acceptable
figure it’d be pretty easy to figure out who the serial murderer of little snow people is……if we place one on an old school mouse trap
…& then tell them they should be thankful you took the trouble to form the thing the hard way…around one of those upright spikes they use to skewer paper slips would be a lot easier & less intrusive
…health & safety would probably wind up stratospheric & people would lose paychecks…but they’ll be too busy shaking off the mousetrap to think about that so they might actually feel grateful?
oh pffft blue on blue collar violence rarely even gets noticed by health and safety
now….walking around with a dangerously uncovered coffee….just fucking might…. especially if you spill some and dont clean it up
I always love a good winter walk in the snow. The world seems quieter when the only sound is the crunch of the snow.
my walk into work in the snow fantastic…early enough to beat the plows and all but the earliest dog walker….. nothing but crunch and virgin snow
well…if it like….april snow…i might also find the occasional pile of drunk student
There have been a few reports over the years of kids getting found after passing out drunk in the snow. I’m not sure how you can be so drunk you don’t get woken up by the cold, but not so drunk you can still walk awy from the party or the bar.
ive woken up under a couple inches of snow before
a good trench coat will save your life
in fact i was pretty damn comfy till i got up and the wind hit me
(edit) oh but the how……its strong booze……you know…beer its hard to drink than faster than it hits you…..gets to a point…you just live in the toilet…peeing…
whiskey or whatever…..oh…you can drink so much more of that than you can metabolize in a timely manner and will keep getting drunker long after you stopped
…you ain’t kidding about the good coat part…I forget exactly what the distinction is but generally we feel the cold keenly where we meet it but the whole point of the warm-blooded thing is that the inside bits are a lot harder to make cold…they…do not like being cold…but alcohol has a shitty magic trick that makes it initially seem like it can warm you up…in that it releases “core heat”…so you get that sensation of warmth radiating outwards…only that drops the temperature of the bit of you it’s much harder to warm up…& from time to time that’s what does for people
…mind you…a scandinavian once told me that it’s all very well that people can acclimatize to sub-zero temperatures to the point of working shirtless doing outdoor manual labor…but if you work up a sweat…like maybe you run for a bus but you miss it & have to wait at the stop for a while…the sheen on your skin can freeze & do what the gold paint did to the lady in gold finger
…so…technically running for buses can kill you
…I try to avoid it even when the weather is fine on the off chance that it should ever become a life-threatening habit that I might unthinkingly fall victim to at an inopportune & inclement juncture
…probably why I’m still alive now I think about it?
honestly….cold weather rules is just..how you need to live life?
dont rush… dont work harder than you need to
late is late… fuck it…im here…i could have called in sick you know?
tbh i think its fairly close to island rules but shaq knows best on that one
Oh I’ve done it. I didn’t exactly pass out, but I left a party (that I co-hosted, but it wasn’t my apartment) and a huge snowstorm had descended on us. I was wearing this enormous, almost Soviet-style, full length and very thick and warm coat, and I careened into a snowbank. A couple of passers-by pulled me out, laughing. They were just out to observe the snowfall, and then we got into a friendly snowball fight, and then Better Half realized I wasn’t with him and double-backed and dragged me into the subway.
Sigh. I used to be so young.