U.S News

PORTLAND, Maine – When chronicle gives you lemons, attain lemonade. When chronicle gives you snow, attain snowballs.

That's the approach some Northeasterners are attractive toward one of the most brutal winters in years. They're staging flash-mob snowball fights, making believe they're at the beach and creating open art with nature's icy job — all in the name of a reprieve from a deadening turn of shoveling, thickened commutes and general battening downbound of the hatches.

"We're most to go stir-crazy with another measure of snow, so I conceive it's time to yield home," said 35-year-old Molly Bryant Roberts, an L.L. Bean employee from metropolis who reveled weekday in a word-of-Facebook snowball fight in Deering Oaks Park.

"You've got to do something," she said. "It's Maine in the wintertime."

A icy faceoff after a assail terminal period drew more than 90 grouping to the park. The assemble that showed up weekday as a huge season assail spread into New England was more overmodest — less than 10, belike because the weather prefabricated movement treacherous — but the spirit was meet as big.

"Why not do something fun?" said broad edifice teacher doc Kearney, 29, hurling snowballs at friends.

In Rindge, N.H., the administrator of campus activity at historiographer Pierce University has place unitedly a season activity information aimed at serving students intend discover of the dorms to beat the season doldrums.

A sweeping hillside in face of the college president's duty gets overturned into a tract where snowboarders crapper pull stunts on rails donated by a ski resort. Students go "snow-kiting," where they are pulled behindhand a kite crossways a icy lake on campus patch on skis or snowboards.

The edifice sends students on weekly charabanc trips around New England for skiing, hiking and another exterior fun. It also holds an period "Cure for Cabin Fever" circumstance in February, motion an interior scene into an all-night party.

This year, partygoers module encounter the antiquity filled with beach sand, palm trees and beach volleyball courts.

In Waterbury, Conn., machine shop miss Harold Figueroa has condemned to motion piles of deceive on municipality streets into entireness of art.

It began most digit months ago when the 44-year-old aspiring creator looked at a deceive slope and saw what looked to him same the representative of a turtle. With a lowercase art and spray painting, it was transformed.

"When I do my artwork and grouping see my fictive impact ... it makes me happy," Figueroa said. "I poverty grouping to enjoy happiness."

So farther this winter, that healthiness includes a deceive monkey, a New England Patriots sign and a copy of a Honda Civic — rank with actual tires and rims.

___

Associated Press writers songster Ramer in Concord, N.H., and king Collins in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.

Source