Beware of the Salt

We had an ice storm here on Monday. When I say "ice storm", I mean that we got some ice. The roads are no longer icy, but there were enough accidents on the freeway system around here that you'd figure that we got an inch of ice with snow on top of it.

Oy vey.

Most of the flyovers, bridges and roads are fine now, particularly if they have had an entire beaches worth of sand dumped on them.

The stairs going up to our new apartment, however, are not.

Henry just about wipes out every time he bounds down them to go to the bathroom. (It's pretty hilarious to see his little paws scrambling to try to get some traction.) He has just about pulled me down with him a time or two, so I figured I'd better solve the problem of icy steps.

The only problem is, nobody sells salt down here.

I thought about it a little bit, and remembered that I had some cheap table salt stashed away in my laundry cabinet. (For the occasional dye job that I need to do on stained tableclothes, napkins, curtains, etc.)

Knowing that table salt can kill grass (and there's a very fancy patch of groundcover under our stairs), I put in a call to my Pops to see if he thought if it was a bad idea to sprinkle the salt on the stairs.

He didn't answer.

I couldn't call Joey because he was (and still is) in class.

In a rare moment of brilliance (?), I decided to just dump the salt on the stairs and, when the groundcover dies in a month or two, pretend I know nothing about it.

It took just a few moments to salt the stairs. Unfortunately, I ran out of salt before I reached the bottom two steps. (I figured that was better than the top two, because if I biff it on the bottom two I haven't got as far to fall.)

Twenty minutes later, I went outside to survey the damage--er, my "work". The ice had melted quite nicely, considering all I'd used was table salt, and the groundcover hadn't started dying yet. All things considered, I don't think that my new landlord is going to be too pleased with the Einstein from Iowa that lives in #297.

But at least I won't fall down the stairs now...