My WI deck, 8:30 a.m., Sunday, February 10:
Time to send the slave #2 son out to blow the snow that fell yesterday and last week. Our driveway is 300+ feet long. Happily, he only had to blow away 1-2" of snow. A walk in the park, really.
I thought he was signaling OK, meaning he was all bundled up and ready to attack the driveway. Turns out he was throwing a gang sign, a "b" for Bloods.
A while later he looked like this:
Let's have a close-up of that face.
This is actually pretty mild. Smokey, who seldom wears a face mask, used to get some really, really impressive icicles in his beard and mustache back in the day when he was Head Snow Blower. Remember Dr. Zhivago? Yeah, those kind of beard and mustache icicles. But Smokey is in Minneapolis right now, and besides, what good is having a teenage boy around if you can't send him to do the cold nasty work you don't want to do yourself?
I didn't really say that, did I?
So.
Anyway.
The photos above show how #2 minimized the amount of exposed skin that would be subject to potential frostbite while he blew the snow for about hour.
This is how he accomplished same when he was loading stuff into his van in preparation for driving to Minneapolis to clean up the sewer backup in the basement of that house. (see "benefit of having teenage boy," above; we do pay him for this stuff, though, we aren't completely heartless)
After that photo he obligingly showed threw me the full gang sign.
Yes, that spells "blood." Why an upstanding boy from rural Wisconsin should know that is something I prefer not to explore.
This, however, is a gang sign we all should know. And use.
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As I was readying this post for publication I realized that I need to knit a hat with attached face mask, maybe from some nice mid-weight STR -- soft, washable, super warm, fun to knit. Really, if it is cold enough to need a face mask, how can one send acrylic to do wool's job?
