S'no way, man!

The kids across the street, who are very young girls, and their mom were out building a snowman the other day. I expect they'd been watching Frozen again. The little girls essentially made a pile of snow with sand buckets and mom added a kind of head. It was a very sad excuse for a snowman. It looked like this:

I didn't want to take a picture in case the mom
does an image search for "bad snowman" and sees her own.

To be fair, even if their technique hadn't sucked it would have been impossible to build a good snowman. This was the snow that fell during our bitter cold, a very powdery stuff, and except for the slop near the street that had been mixed with salt, it had no adherence at all. Not good packing snow, as they say.

Building a snowman is not that easy, though, even if the snow is ideal. Good packing snow is heavy. It takes practice to learn to roll good boulders for that classic stacked look. Where I grew up in the city, we didn't have big, flat yards where you could roll up a decent snowman. Dad never showed us the technique, probably because he came from a part of the city where there were no yards. When I was a boy I tried to build a snowman, basically by piling snow up, and got a huge wart almost as tall as me. Kind of looked like the yard had sprung a snowy, if you know what I mean. Took forever to melt.

I learned to make a snowman when I moved out here to exurbia, and discovered that it requires a lot of effort. The kids in the Peanuts strip always looked like they were working hard when they were building snowfolk, but they would make giant snowmen that had arms and things. Mine still looked like lumps.

Calvin made even bigger snowmen, tons of them, sometimes in ridiculous shapes:

I had no access to old pipes or scarves, and certainly not to old top hats, magical or not. I couldn't even figure out where to get pieces of coal. Hell, Mom wouldn't even let me have a carrot. "What do you want that for? Building a what? You're just gonna wind up feeding the squirrels."

So I can't claim any big experience with snowmen. This may be the best snowman I ever built:

Nice, huh?

About four inches high, sitting on the railing. Then I was ready for a nap.