LAST EDITED ON 01-28-13 AT 01:34 PM (EST)

LAST EDITED ON 01-28-13 AT 09:50 AM (EST)

Certain activities which would normally be considered perfectly ordinary become hazardous in the cold. Like, say, walking past a self-service open-bay car wash.

To wit, the kind of car wash where you pull your car in at any hour of the day or night and put quarters into machines which at least occasionally bother to count them and activate hoses that spray your car with soap and water except that the owner of the car wash maintains nothing and those hoses continually leak regardless of quarters so in cold weather you get a slow flow of soap and water which freezes to the concrete and builds up in layers as still more leaks out because the hoses themselves never freeze and ultimately this results in a glacier coating the entire sidewalk in front of the car wash plus part of the road so you can't step into it and you can't cross the street because there's nowhere to walk there so it's either middle of the road and die or try to inch your way very carefully across the ice field and oh dear gawds I'm going to be feeling that for weeks.

I'm not a particularly litigious person: I've never sued anyone over anything. But this time, I am sorely -- very sorely -- tempted, if only to scare the facility's owner into fixing the bloody hoses before someone dies.

Ow.