Final Exam: Brainside Out 1001

The personality of our ice maker could only be described as over-zealous. It makes ice, it fills itself up with ice, and it continues to make more ice. You know when the ice maker is full because it will instantly fill your glass with ice, no questions asked. It fills your glass with ice before you can even ask the question Why am I getting ice? I want to enjoy a tall glass of beer to celebrate the sounds my wrists make, they sound like cement mixers. I want to celebrate the cement mixers with a glass of beer, but I don’t need ice for a glass of beer.

I don’t need ice, but before I can say so our ice maker has already filled my glass with ice. And when this happens, and it happens a lot, we know that when we open the freezer all the ice will pour out and get all over our cherry floors. To keep this from happening I will often empty our ice maker into a large mixing bowl, and fling the ice into the street for the cars. I like to think of it as tossing feed to the chickens. I toss the ice to the cars and they all crowd around one another to get best pickings at the ice.

The cars are learning, they learn so fast these days with their computer chips and their mouse brains that have flown F-16 fighter jets, so they know that when I leave the house with a large metal bowl that they will probably get fed. The cars all drive up on the lawn begging for ice, and while this was okay a few months ago when we didn’t have a lawn, we now have a lovely carpet of sod that the cars tear up when they beg for ice.

I have since learned that our ice maker has an off switch. We knew this, apparently, but Shane forbids us from using the off switch. You see, Shane has sympathy for our ice maker, and Shane understands that our ice maker has feelings, and its feelings get hurt when we don’t let it get enough exercise. It gets bored and irritable.

It gets bored and irritable, and not only that, the cars will starve to death this winter if we don’t feed them. They need us to feed them this winter because it has been a bad snow year so far for the Northwest. It’s been so bad that Mount Hood hasn’t opened because of rain, and runs at Mount Bachelor have been closed because of avalanches.

You might say that an avalanche suggests a good snow year. You might say that, but consider this. Consider that when an avalanche happens, all the snow peels right off the mountain and into the parking lots and rustic cabins. Consider that we ski on the mountain, not on the parking lots and rustic cabins.

Take a piece of paper and sketch out a diagram that illustrates where the snow is and where the snow needs to be. Use arrows and familiar iconography to illustrate your point.

You have fifteen minutes.