The Salad Days

What is it, you ask? It's our furnace. Currently, it's 3 degrees and falling, and this beige box here is the most precious thing we own right now.

You bet I have an insurance policy on it. For 15 bucks a month, I am assured that if anything happens to this baby, I get another one.

The US Pond Hockey Championships begin tomorrow in our backyard, and I'm wondering that it may be too cold for ice hockey. Yes, too cold for ice hockey.

But this weather is an essential part of being a Minnesotan. The pleasures of summer are tempered by the reality of winter. And the harshness of winter is combated by a beige box and the spirit that refuses to cancel a hockey tournament despite the danger of frostbite. The phrase I hear is that the coldest days of winter are our payment for how glorious our summers are. Nothing could be truer, or more Minnesotan.