How much do I love the snow?

About 95%, which is a way higher rating than I give Britney “Whoops, I recorded the same song/mocked the institution of marriage again” Spears. But you already knew that.

For those of you who haven’t been checking weather.com compulsively since Friday (just like I haven’t), it snowed like a badass all weekend in Chicago, covering the ground and trees and cars and everything else with 72 feet* of fluffy white winterness.

*I made that number up because I’m too lazy to look up the real number. But the snow did pile up/drift/get plowed into piles as high as my nipples in quite a few places. And I walked by plenty of cars yesterday that were identifiable only by their lonely little antennas sticking up like ugly little (I need some better imagery here) lightning rods on amorphous white mountains as high as (I need a better benchmark here) my nipples.

I would have been perfectly content to ride out the storm from the warmth and safety of my little shoebox in the sky, but my weekend schedule had other plans for me. And the hearty Midwestern souls who helped me fill my schedule were not the types to let amorphous mountains of snow get in the way of anybody’s plans.

So I spent the weekend riding the train and/or marching through the drifts—dealing with driving and parking in this stuff was not on my list—to get from auditions to rehearsals to directors’ meetings for two different shows because I’m that gay. On the plus side, everything’s choreographed and taught for next weekend’s drag show (8 pm-ish at Hydrate on Saturday the 29th, if you want to go). On the other plus side, plans are shaping up nicely for the chorus’ spring show, which I’m also choreographing (co-choreographing, technically, with two other guys). On the other plus side, all my hiking through the snow gave me some up-close-and-personal time with the staggering beauty a simple layer of snow can add to everything it touches. And on the other plus side (are you getting bored with my relentless optimism here?), walking through unshoveled snow in sturdy, unfashionable boots is an amazing cardio workout.

But what about the 5% I don’t like about snow? Two words: dog pee. Snow provides a strikingly high-contrast background for dog pee, which hits each fluffy white drift with enough force and heat that it lasers little caverns of crystallized yellow repulsiveness that hang gape-mouthed, suspended in time until nature mercifully raises the temperature and melts it all into the grass where innocent children romp barefoot in the summer.

Granted, the summer brings even more—and even fresher!—dog pee for children to romp in, but it never appears in that unsettling, frozen shade of Martharita yellow. And it never stares up at you—mockingly, leeringly, effectively destroying your taste for the syrupy goodness of flavored Sno-Cones forever—for weeks and weeks the way it does as you trudge by on your daily winter business.

And when you live in Chicago—where there are more dogs per capita than there are Bush haters—that adds up to a lot of frozen pee caverns.

So even though the snow has a good beat and you can dance to it, I have to give it a 95.