Sometimes sleeping in is a good thing

When I went to college the first time, I had a wealthy roommate, we'll call him...Bernardo.

Bernardo's parents owned a pimp cabin up in the Sierras that's bigger than most people's houses. They had money.

At the time, I had never been skiing before. I had no desire to. I didn't have the money to do it anyways, so when they woke up at six in the morning to go skiing, I stayed behind with two of Bernardo's slacker friends.

We woke up at the crack of noon and raided his fridge, gobbling down leftover meat, bread, milk, cheese, and whatever else we could find that wouldn't take too much effort to put together. Then one of us had a lightbulb go off. I forgot who, and don't want to take credit for it because I have no idea if it was my idea or not.

Let's not let them back in.

You see, California's mountains get snow. They get so much snow that people like the Donners got lost and ate each other. So the cabin had two entrances. One was snowed in, the other required climbing up the slippery wooden stairs to the deck. Come to think of it, this cabin would probably be easy to defend from zombies during winter time.

This gave us time to make weapons. By one o'clock, we had started. We made literally hundreds of snowballs and we made some big bombs if one of them would be so foolish to try to muscle their way upstairs.

After making sure we had enough ammunition for at least one hour of throwing, we blocked ourselves in, making a giant wall in the middle of the staircase and sticking icicles out of it, so it resembled one of those Vietcong death traps in that John Wayne Green Beret movie. Anyone lunging at that thing would simply die.

The one who finished the wall and stuck the icicles in had to be carried up on the railing by the other two of us. It was ugly and we hoped we didn't drop him or else we'd have to take his broken leg to the hospital instead of raining ice cold death on Bernardo and the other two skiing fools.

So we sat. And waited. And waited. And finally we heard the chains of Bernardo's car drive up the street. Ha ha.

Using those cheap plastic sleds as shields, we took cover and they knew something was up immediately. They approached cautiously and right as they got within striking distance, three snowballs shot at them, pelting them in their thick ski jackets.

The three of them bolted, taking cover behind trees and making their own snowballs. They countered, but their attacks were futile. For one, we had the upper ground and we had so many snowballs we didn't have to aim. We just kept throwing, aiming at the upper body because a high snowball causes a ducking response.

It took them a half hour to take the icicles down from our death trap and start dismantling the wall. Whenever they got close, they got pelted mercilessly. They used everything they could for shields but it was no use. Any skin that showed got hit hard. Keep in mind we were all young and in shape at the time, playing sports every chance we got. So when we hit someone with a snowball, it hurt.

Needless to say, we won that battle. They had to call for a ceasefire and we ignored their first and second requests, but acknowledged their third. That will teach them for waking up bright and early. Sometimes, it's just better to sleep in.