Winter: Now with 33% more discontent

We had spent the three weeks using snowshoes to try and stamp down a path so that the MUDDOOD would drive over the snow.

January’s has been light, fluffy, dust-like snow, the snow you get when the temperature doesn’t even thinking about waking up to the snow-packing levels necessary for human survival. It has been cold, and the cold has not relented, even when met with my (until now) unprecedented capacity for whining.

Two feet of this snow, or more, is taking up squatter’s rights on my ground, refusing to go anywhere. This is snow that seems to me (admittedly not a great master of snow) incapable of succumbing to our daily stampede, snow that just gets blown elsewhere when your foot comes down on it. His idea was to stamp it down into a path that the MUD DOOD could traverse. And so, after a week of what I’d taken as futile attempt at stamping a path, a week of both of us literally stomping up and down the hill, all sweat and huff by the time we reach either end (stomping is apparently great exercise), the day came when, during one such hike, I was admonished for not sufficiently WIDENING THE PATH, whereupon I asked:

Do you think this might be futile? Maybe we ought to lay down one firm, slim, footpath instead, and forget the road?

(If you’ve never tried, it’s actually a little difficult to plough a road with snowshoes. This is why they have trucks with buckets and winches and complicated electrical systems the likes of which will never be strapped to the soles of my feet).

But back to the question: I’d asked if maybe this was the smartest idea we’d ever had. At which I was met with a housecall from the belligerati: I have been busting my balls to get the path ready for the MUDDOOD. If you don’t want to stamp down the path, don’t do it. I don’t fucking care.

A response replete with assoholism, to be sure, but lest this blogh devolve all too far into the details of our romantics, remember that we share 160 feet of living space, in mid-January climate, with no MUDDOOD. Temperaments are even shorter than the days, and the occasional assoholics, delivered from both directions, is to be expected. We got over that spat, and I helped with the continued snowshoe-shuffle for a couple more days.

Of course, two days later was followed by another foot of snow, and another foot a couple of days after that, and the last attempt to bring the MUDDOOD into commission was met with me pushing it out of a snowbank a distance of less than fifty feet from its originally parked space. Needless to say, my proposed narrow footpath is now in the finest of shape, and we’ll see the MUDDOOD in another couple of months, and be in fine rockhardbody shape until then. If you see me, ask to touch it. It’s firmer than that of anybody else around, I can promise you that.