Watching Ice Melt

IMG_1720The weird space where this winter storm, working and my outside interests collide…

So, in the middle of everything with Snowzilla, a pipe at my curling club sprang a leak, which ate a hole all the way through the ice.  Members of the Ice Crew have been spending the week fixing the damage… but today was a controlled melt, which requires someone to be sitting at the club to monitor things.

And because of the weather, Monster’s school was closed again.  So this seemed perfect – I could sit there, get my work done, monitor the ice, and watch the Monster.

You’d think.

This was obviously not as easy as it sounds.  I’d already spent most of the week away from the office due to being unable to get in, and the Monster’s been going stir-crazy from being home from school.  So while it sounds like a phenomenal idea to take him for an hour-each-way car ride and let him have the whole warm room at my club to run around in…

First, there’s this Whole Other Room that we were trying to keep him out of.  A whole room with a floor that’s a giant sheet of (slowly melting) ice.  We’d opened the doors from the warm room into the ice shed to let the heat in the warm room accelerate the  melting, but that gave him these two big openings to run through and explore.  That we had the stones on the side of the sheet where he could count them and touch them was an added bonus.  And that I kept trying to give him other things to do – cable shows, the iPad, little games in the Warm Room – didn’t help distract him one bit.

Then, there’s the fact that the other room is really this metal building with struts and a long walkway down each side.  The Monster discovered that he could fit between the struts and the wall, and therefore (unlike his father, who has to fling himself around each strut to make his way down the floor) could just safely cruise down the wall towards the open maintenance room at the far end.  This was discovered when I was talking with a fellow club member and looked up to realize that the Monster was gone… and half-way down the sheet.  (At least he wasn’t walking in the water, because that’d be both dangerous and messy.)

Finally, once I’d made sure that he understood not to go into the ice shed… I completely underestimated his ability to quietly steal every last snack item from the lunch bag without me noticing that he was doing it.  I’d packed food for both of us… and at least I got to have my sandwich.

Still, he seems much better for having had something to do outside the house for the day, and my club will hopefully have ice back early next week…

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