And here's one on Mom...
The year was 1993. It was about a month before I moved away from upstate NY, while I was living on one of the Finger Lakes southwest of Syracuse.

There was a massive snowstorm in April that dumped about three feet of snow overnight. It took me a day to dig out my cars from it and paralyzed Syracuse for a couple of days- not an easy thing to do.

That weekend I called up my parents to see how they had fared in the Adirondacks. Mom said that Dad was very worried, as rain was in the forecast. Rain on a large amount of fluffy snow is like water into a sponge- and that's usually what causes roofs to collapse up there. So I agreed to come up and shovel the roofs with Dad.

He and I spent the better part of the morning and afternoon on the roof with our shovels. We realized that the best approach was to use the shovels to cut the snow into blocks and slide them to the edge of the roof, so we dumped these three and a half foot tall blocks down about twenty feet to form a pile that was to stay there well into May.

When we finished, Dad was pretty well wiped out- he was 65 at the time- so when Mom asked if he was also going to clear off the woodsheds, he growled that as far as he was concerned the goddam things could collapse. Mom turned to me. "What do you think? Are you up for shoveling a bit more?"

"Sure." I was thirty at that point and had had some coffee, so I was still able to go on. So Mom and I set up a ladder on the back of the woodshed roof and climbed up to shovel.

We used the same technique- cut a block, get the shovel under it and drag it to the edge- and got it cleared reasonably quickly. But when I went to climb down I realized that I had done something very stupid.

We had buried the goddam ladder under the snow.

I shook my head. "Sorry, Mom. I should have thought of that. I'll jump down into the snow and dig it out." And I hopped down about eight feet and landed knee deep in the pile we had made.

I was about to dig out the ladder when I heard, "Hey, that looked like fun!" And I looked up just in time to see my 63 year old mother sailing through the air and end up waist deep in the snow.

It took me a few minutes extra to dig her out because we were both laughing so hard...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 5 Jul 2007, 19:11, Reply)