About this global warming...

Quick, someone grab an aerosol can and unload it...it's freezing up here!

We've had the pleasure of sub-zero temperatures for several days in a row. It got up to 18 degrees today and it felt like a heat wave. It's supposed to drop down to the single digits again tonight and tomorrow, but it should stay above zero. Unless you count the wind chill, and then you are just a harbinger of sorrow.

We took the kids sledding on Sunday. There's a great hill right around the corner, between a high school and a middle school. The bottom of the hill ends right into the parking lot. There's no curb, so it's normally a smooth transition.

If you thought, "Why Rick, why would you say 'normally'? Does that imply that something was different this weekend?" you would have been correct. As it turns out, the significant snow that accumulated was perfect fodder for a snow plow, which pushed it all in a long plie stretching across the bottom of our sledding hill.

But it wasn't a blockade. It was a jump! Adults and children were able to get about three feet of air and about 5 yards of distance off that sucker. That was awesome if you landed on your sled.

Remember that at the end of the hill, and therefore on the other side of the jump, was a parking lot. Hard, flat asphalt.

It does not take a psychic to figure out that I was not 100% successful in landing on the sled. I did several times...enough to encourage me to go again. Kind of like that one good shot in a round of golf.

But unlike golf, this hurt like the dickens when a stray limb missed the sled upon landing, choosing instead to connect directly with the asphalt. I have a huge bruise on my hip, my left knee is all jacked up, and my right shoulder hurts really bad (although the shoulder thing is from an attempt to go down standing on the sled like a snowboard. For what it's worth, I did make it to the bottom).