A Ballpark Calculation

For whatever reason, my mind turned to numbers the other day.

Melting the snow.

After successfully creating Dover's first (and probably only) snow mountain of the winter season, I wondered - just how much snow did I move to create this dog playheap? I scavenged around to find my trusty 2 yard stick and measured the terrace, which ended up being  21 feet long and 13 feet wide, for an area of 273 square feet. Then I melted down a one foot cube of snow and measured the water that formed; this gave me the figure that one square foot of this particular snow weighed 6 pounds. So, I moved  273 x 6 = 1,638 pounds of snow, more or less. I was disappointed I didn't make a ton, only eight tenths of a ton. In the process, I learned that the word "ton" comes from "tun," which referred to "the largest barrel."

Three dogs.