One of my best college memories:<p>I went to school at Ohio University, which is in Athens, OH - the Southern part of the state. Snowfall was pretty rare down there, we p
probably only got one good one a year.<p>I was also in a fraternity - a source of lots of good times and also some bad ones. But most importantly for this story, it meant that I knew about 50 different guys on campus.<p>In my senior year we got a pretty awesome fall of packing snow, and the house where I was living had a big parking lot as basically its backyard, which served as parking for 12-15 cars for nearby houses. Classes were cancelled.<p>So, that morning me and the other couple guys who lived in my house put on our best approximation of snow appropriate clothes, and went outside to the parking lot to build a fort. We starting making bricks with our recycling container, which was about the size of a 44qt storage tub. Our goal was to make an igloo big enough for a circle of about 15 of us to sit, so our first layer needed something like 30 blocks.<p>Time went on, and various other bros starting showing up. By the end of the day, we had 20 young dudes shoveling snow into those recycling totes. Even with that amount of workers, it was slow progress. The fort was humongous! But after working for a few hours, we had a circle about 10-12 feet in diameter with walls 4 feet high.<p>At that point our resolve to build an actual igloo had crumbled, and we were running out of easily accessed parking lot snow, so we compromised, and threw a big white tarp over the whole thing. Just like that, we had our giant fort, roofed over (and hey, safer too).<p>It was an all day job to get that far, and the rewards were worth it - we sat out in the fort with frozen asses, drinking very cold beer and filling it up with pot smoke, laughing and singing and telling stories. It was a genuinely magical few days, it felt like building that thing together had broken down some cliques and brought our group of dudes together. Almost every brother stopped by at least once.<p>It didn't occur to me until later that that was probably the last time in my life all the conditions would line up to build something that large out of snow. How often do you find a huge parking lot, covered in packing snow, and 20 strapping young lads with nothing better to do than listen to some nerd telling them where to put it?<p>Good times.