why is this not as fun as it used to be?

Guest blogger Secondo graciously agreed to let me use a blog post, title and all, that he wrote last night as a school assignment.

For the topic of this blog, look outside! We have over a foot of snow which would make any elementary-schooler happier than an all-day marathon of Spongebob. So why am I inside?

If you were like me, from ages 1-10 you were ecstatic about snow, even if it was just an inch or a flurry. Every morning during winter I would wake up and run to my window hoping to see a foot of snow that the weatherman somehow had missed on his radar. Needless to say, most mornings were a bitter disappointment. However there was that rare day that I would open my eyes to see the ground covered in the most beautiful thing imaginable: snow! I would run downstairs, yelling for my brothers to wake up, and quickly slide into my snow pants, mittens, hat and a big puffy snow jacket that my Mom would make me wear. Grabbing a shovel, I would rush outside and begin shoveling the driveway. After over an hour of hard work beside my brothers and Dad, the driveway would be clear.

Now, the only thing to do was run around in the snow like a fool; start to make a snowman but give up because it's too hard; dive into the snow and make a snow angel, only for it to be ruined when I got up; run around some more; get pelted by a snowball in the face; cry for five minutes; throw a retaliating snowball at my brother; get hit in the face again; cry some more; make a huge fort in the big piles of snow from the shoveling; stock the fort with insane amounts of snowballs; make the fort impenetrable; stand guard for an hour before I realize that nobody will be attacking my fort; feel like an idiot; run around some more to clear my mind; run to the irrigation pond; figure out its frozen; run inside to get ice skates; skate on the pond until I hear a crack and then get too scared to skate anymore; go inside to change my mittens; snow football!; trace the word HI in the snow so that people in airplanes can read it; stand there for a while waving at planes; nobody waves back; disappointment; try to sled on a tiny hill; no fun; run inside and beg Dad to drive me and my brothers to the golf course where the really big hill is; succeed; get to the huge hill; sled down it; WOW!; repeat this for an hour; decide to sled down really steep icy hill; go about ten feet down; flip off the front of the sled; face plant; tumble down the rest of the hill; cry as my Dad held ice to my bloody nose; go home; drink an amount of hot chocolate that was previously thought of as humanly impossible; try to go outside again; throw a fit when my Mom said it was “too dark” and “too dangerous” to go outside; more hot chocolate; eat a huge dinner; awful sugar crash (from the hot chocolate); almost immediately fall asleep in my bed.

I was as happy as everybody else that the snow was coming down and that we were going to get some time off of school. On the ride home however, I was not at all pleased with the snow because it doubled the time I had to spend in that stuffy, cramped van. I also heard stories of buses going off the road and people getting seriously injured in car accidents. It was around then that my dad veered off the driveway in the plow truck after hitting a huge patch of ice. Thankfully, he was okay, but I realized then that snow is not that beautiful substance it used to be.

For hours my brothers, Dad, Mom and I fought the blizzard, but the snow we would shovel off the driveway would just be blown back on the asphalt. Somehow, even with the snow falling at a rate of one inch per hour, we finally cleared our very long driveway, as well as the small parking lot for my Dad’s doctor’s practice, unaided by the help of the plow truck which even now is still a foot deep in the ground. Now I see snow not as a beautiful element, but rather as a dangerous matter that requires a lot of manpower to deal with. This is rather sad, but this is why I’m writing this blog. However, I still have a love for snow. It still stands as a stronghold for imagination and creativity. Snow can be dangerous, but without it there would be no skiing or snowboarding, no snow cones, nothing to look forward to in the great season of winter.

Terzo had to invite over a friend so he had someone to play with.

Secondo, clearly, is over it.