I confess, I haven’t been very good about updating this thing lately. However, my wife informed me last night that I needed to post something, because what kind of post was that back on the fifteenth? I mean, really? “Just beware”? Sheesh…

So, here’s a bit of a story. This weekend was wet and nasty. We started with some snow on Friday night, which changed over the next several hours into sleet, freezing rain and — eventually — straight-up rain. Friday night was the mid-month Vampire LARP up at UMO, and while I was planning on attending it at first, the weather was just awful, and I decided to stay home. I have no idea what happened (if anything).

(Which reminds me… I haven’t done an episode of The More Things Change in a while. I made one post recently, but much like this blog, that one has fallen into the Pit of Can’t Be Bothered Right Now.)

Saturday was a continuation of Friday, weather-wise. The precipitation stopped around mid-afternoon. The schedule for the evening included Mage LARP on campus (which got canceled). I got out of work at 6:30pm, and came home to find that the front walk was… well… flooded.

See, the snow that fell overnight was not washed away by the subsequent rain — it just sucked it up like some kind of spongy, amorphous, slime-mold creature spawned by a Gary Gygax fever-dream. You know how snow, due to the inherent crystalline structure of ice, and its airy consistency, is less dense than water? The stuff on the sidewalk in front of our house was solid water — not ice, but water in solid form. “Snow” (if you will) that was as dense as water. Take snow, replace all the air with water… that’s what we had.

The melting runoff from further uphill (we are just on the downhill side of the curve of our street), which flowed so nicely from the cleanly-shoveled sidewalks and driveways of our uphill neighbors, came to a gurgling halt on our front walk, which had been dammed by this damned (see what I did there — clever, right?) mutant snow.

You would step on this stuff, testing its solidity… and it would lure you in… tempt you with false resilience. You shift a bit more weight onto your foot, start to bring your other foot off the ground…

And the faux-snow-beast would swallow your lead foot with a mocking schplash (that is, snowy crunch mixed with watery splash — more the latter than the former), filling your footwear of choice (in my case — foolishly — sneakers) with its icy saliva.

This would be followed by a burst of profanity, and a desperate search for some honest-to-God solid ground to put the other foot on so you don’t end up with two sodden feet.

After negotiating the treacherous ground of the sidewalk (mainly by avoiding it entirely, picking my way across the icy drift of the front yard), I get inside the house, change my socks, put my boots on, and go out to open a channel to allow the uphill floodwaters to pass by our home unimpeded… and clear out the end of the driveway, which the city plows had so thoughtfully blocked with even more of this solid water.

It was an hour of wet, annoying, back-breaking work.

So that was my weekend. Hope yours was just as enjoyable.

It is late, and I need sleep. I will update more later.