Yesterday was a nice bright sunny day here in SE Wisconsin so I felt like doing something outside. For a reason I can’t explain, I thought that building an igloo would be a fine way to spend the day.
I got an old dull knife about 7" long, donned my Carharrt insulated bib overalls and got to work. I cut into a drift about 3’ high right behind the house. After about 5 minutes I was getting really good at carving blocks of snow out of the drift. I was cutting them about 5"x 5"x 12". The snow was nice and dense and was almost like cutting blocks of styrofoam. I cut a 2 foot wide path into the drift and then cut blocks out so that I had a nice circle about 6’ in diameter. Things were looking promising.
So I started stacking the blocks. I had absolutely no confidence that I would be successful, but before I knew it, I had some lovely gracefully curving walls about 4 feet high. Along with the 3 foot walls of the snowbank it was looking like it was going to be very spacious. My wife wandered outside to see what I was up to and laughed at me. Then she went and got the camera and took pictures, I’m assuming to show prove to people that she is married to a lunatic. I told her “If this works I am sleeping in here tonight” and she laughed even harder.
But that’s where things started to go wrong. The pitch was getting too steep and my blocks were falling in, often taking out sections of wall below them. I tried packing wet snow into weak spots, but that wasn’t working. I tried cutting the blocks in half so that they were thinner, that didn’t work either.
So, to make a long story slightly less long, I failed. But I did get a little bit of a suntan and I have a kick-ass snowfort in case the neighbors try to stage a surprise snowball raid.
There ya go, about as mundane and pointless as you can get.