For all of the people worried about global warming, well, we have not seen much of it here in the upper midwest this winter. We have had plenty of snow-we have already surpassed the snowfall for ALL of last winter-and we are only into the second week of January.

When you have days of snow, which gets melted and then frozen, it can create very slippery conditions on the roads. My daughter Rachel had a small accident in her truck on Highway 169 that did not hurt anybody-but her truck (which she calls “Teddy”) sustained a couple of thousand dollars in damage to the front end that needed to get repaired to make the truck safe to drive. We just picked the car up from the repair shop the other day, and Teddy looks brand new.

My son Ian had a one-car accident in his fiancee Andrea’s VW which put some damage to the front end. 

Well, I had my own mishap over a week ago. I had borrowed Ian’s car to go to the gym and to go grocery shopping. Ian’s car is a veritable aircraft carrier, a very large GM product with rear wheel drive that steers like a boat even in the best of conditions. When I was coming home and trying to get into my driveway, I hit a patch of ice and just kept drifting… ours and our neighbor’s mailbox looming closer and closer to the car… in seconds, there was the snap and splintering of wood as I took out both mailboxes.

Boy, did I feel like a putz. For those who care,  Ian’s car did not even have a scratch on it.

When I sheepishly went over to my neighbor’s house to explain the demise of their mailbox, Rosie took the news with surprising good humor, and accepted my plan of doing a short term fix with a long term solution coming in the spring.

Ian came up with a temporary fix to the mailboxes using a saw horse, some wood and some sandbags to serve as an anchor for the mailboxes- but a definitive repair won’t be possible until all of the snow melts and we can use a post hole digger to set up a new 4×4 post to serve as a base for the newer and more improved mailboxes. 

Winter in Minnesota. Gotta love it.