code and winter weather

So for a while at work, we were in "code freeze."  That's the interval when the code is as done as it's going to be before a release, and nobody can breathe on it, or look at it funny, much less change anything, lest you break it.  At my old job, there was a noticeable interval of this sort of thing, while the quality assurance people put the program through its paces before burning it to CD; they REALLY didn't want engineers doing anything that might foul up the tests that had already passed.  Code freeze is a reasonable thing, though of course you want to minimize the time you're in it.*

Then there's code slush. 

( slushiness, slipping, and sliding )

All in all, being at work right now reminds me very strongly of walking around outside.  Not exactly my favorite. 

sigh.

*I think current feeling/best practice is against code freezes, but it's how I was trained, and hard to avoid with a tiny team.  Especially when there's good evidence that one or more team members doesn't really know how to merge changes across branches.