Winter in Minnesota

Your contacts will freeze, making your vision blurry. You will refuse to blink for fear of having to take off your mitten to fix the contact.

Your boogers will freeze. Until you’ve experience this sensation, you cannot understand how very odd it is.

If you bend your head and breathe into your jacket or scarf, your breath will be deflected back into your face, where the vapor will freeze on your eyelashes. Upon entering a warm building, the vapor will melt and track mascara down your cheeks.

It is common to see people wearing Sorels and suits at the same time.

You know that earflap hat Eddie wears in Christmas Vacation? Yeah, I own one of those. So does the mister. And the neighbor. And about a dozen people at my train stop. And we wear them.

You think nothing of having to hop over a snowbank and dodge a guy with a snowblower on the way to your office.

You’re a girl and you can run a snowblower.

You debate swapping ice scrapers with your husband because his has those nice foam grips on the handle.

You find it difficult to take global warming concerns seriously given the fact the high for the day is below zero.

The CD player in your car will not work because it is just too damned cold.

Motorists in public transit park-and-ride lots will jump each other’s cars or push each other out of plowed-in parking places with nary a thought.

The first few snowfalls of the year, even if it’s only a couple of inches, will result in backed up traffic for hours. By February, however, motorists fly on the highways, doing 80 miles an hour through a foot of snow, without flinching.

You stop to check your tires because it sounds like you’ve got a flat. What you really have is so much snow packed into your wheel wells that your tires are rubbing it.

You “lock the hubs” in at least one four-wheel-drive vehicle.

You will take your car to an empty parking lot and whip shitties* for 20 minutes, laughing hysterically the whole time.

It will take you ten minutes to get ready to leave the office at the end of the day because you’ve got to pile on so much warm gear.

You will give up on shaving your legs because (1) your skin is so dry, and (2) it’s going to be three months before you wear a skirt again anyway.

*Whip Shitties: take your car to an icy, slippery area with no obstacles. Get up some speed, then hit the brakes and turn the wheel sharply. The car will, if you do it right, lose traction and spin dizzily around. There are techniques for front wheel and rear wheel drive vehicles and using the emergency brake, but the general concept holds.