So lets build a snowman. In the moat.

So let’s build a snowman. In the moat. So it’s been cold lately. And when I mean cold, I mean like our-room-whose-temperature-usually-hovers-somewhere-between-the-sixth-and-seventh-circles-of-hell-on-a-good-day-was-even-cold type of cold. But seriously, I’m from Michigan, so Boston cold is still no big deal. To be honest, if it starts getting cold you will probably see a noticeable change in my personal enthusiasm levels inversely proportional to the temperature, though this kind of breaks down once it gets below 0, because I kind of like to pretend that temperatures like that don’t exist. Anyways. The point of all this is that when it’s cold, it snows, which is pretty much the best. So while heading to Chinatown last weekend with my friends Sumi and Steph, we were walking by the moat of the MIT chapel, which is just an empty concrete pit filled with snow during the winter. Like this. So we’re just joking around and whatnot, and I’m all “hey, wouldn’t it be awesome to make a drowning snowman in the moat?” And we laugh, agree that it would probably one of the more epic things we’d done in a while, and proceed to gorge ourselves in Chinatown and forget about it. This isn’t over, though. I was legitimately serious about the snowman thing, because, you know, I like snow. And my friend Steph is from California and clearly needed to be taught how to make a snowman, which I feel is some essential life skill. So first we tried packing the snow, which failed because it was too cold. But clearly, this was way too good of an idea to abandon, so we went ice chunk hunting and let Steph use her newly-found PE Taekwondo mad kicking skillz to cut them down into manageable sizes. … though we still had trouble actually lifting them. After some creative lifting though (mainly, me just lifting it and making the two of them feel bad), we managed to get the chunks into the moat, grabbed a few branches from the surrounding bushes, stole a few buttons from the McCormick sewing room and voila, we had a snowman doing backstroke. This was clearly not enough, though. So we run back to McCormick, print off a NO SWIMMING sign, run around mine and Sumis sorority looking for clear packing tape for lamination purposes, and run back to the moat to put it up. Throw in a chunk of ice for a shark fin, snow angels, and you have yourself one of the most impressive things I’ve done in a while. :) Coolest moment of IAP: sitting in the student center and hearing someone remark as they walked by, “hey, did you see that snowman in the moat? Isn’t that hilarious?”