Tup, what a wonderful analogy. The only problem is when you hit your thumb with the hammer you go through a few stages. The first one is when you are swinging the hammer at your thumb thinking to yourself (in slow motion) "Uh oh,I am about to smash my thumb". As the hammer arcs through the air and makes first contact you think "yep, I'm bashing my thumb" So then the crushing , searing pain jolts through your thumb and along nerves to your brain. At this point your eyes bug out of their sockets and your mouth falls open. Some sort of warbbled and painful protest is emitted from your mouth and the hammer is instantly dropped to the floor. (Enter the first snow...)

Throbbing, your thumb is now starting to swell and decorate itself with a nice purple hue.(maybe I can match the colour for a Blood Leech) After plunging your thumb into ice water for a while the pain subsides somewhat. Being careful you wrap up your thumb with padding and set about doing normal daily activities; fishing, plundering and other fair-weather pirate activities. (Enter pitifully underdressed person -read Floridian- shovelling snow)

After a day or so your thumbnail falls off just in time for the second snowfall of the year. Now you have quite the disturbing thumb to scare people with. Only thing is once you've shown them they won't help you shovel the snow!

As the season meanders it's way through our calendars the debilitating thumb pain is now down to a dull throbbing pain that, it seems, will never go away.... kinda like this ice and slush around here.

Oh and what on earth were y'all Floridians doing with a hammer? Making a snow shovel of course. Despite NAFTA snow shovels are hard to get in the southern States you know.

Now if someone can just think of an analogy for when your boot lace gets consumed by the snow blower. Hmmm