A few times during our oddly moderate winter, I noticed Pam\u2019s Toyota had a slight slug when I started it.\u00a0 If you are a northerner, you notice those things.\u00a0 I was suspicious of the six-year-old battery.<\/p>\n
Our winter is no longer \u201cmoderate.\u201d\u00a0 Sure enough, after the car sat in below-zero temps, I went to start it Sunday and got a \u201cruhr, ruhr, ruh.\u201d \u00a0It was the sound of a car that had no intention of starting.\u00a0 A short time on a battery charger got it going.\u00a0 But now my concerns about that battery were less hypothetical.\u00a0 It couldn\u2019t be trusted.\u00a0 Trust is essential in relationships, whether between man and woman, or man and machine.<\/p>\n
Pam had to work Monday morning in New Ulm, so I lay in bed that night thinking of options.\u00a0 She could take the older vehicle that doesn\u2019t really warm up and think unfriendly thoughts about her husband.\u00a0 Or she could take her Toyota that might start after sitting out all day.\u00a0 Or it might not, and she would think even unfriendlier thoughts about her husband.\u00a0 Neither of those sounded good.\u00a0 I have to live with this woman.<\/p>\n
I decided on Plan C.\u00a0 Plan C was to get the old battery out with cold tools in the dim morning light, run to town when NAPA opened at 8:00, and try to get a new one installed before Pam had to leave at 8:30.\u00a0 Every part of the plan had to work well.\u00a0 I can\u2019t remember the last time every part of a plan worked well.\u00a0 But with frosty fingers, I was able to get her off by 9:00.\u00a0 Frosty fingers being preferable to a frosty marriage.<\/p>\n
Cars and trucks that start on deeply cold winter mornings are a blessing.\u00a0 A bowed head and a \u201cThank you God!\u201d are called for.\u00a0 The Catholic Church has patron saints for all manner of difficult situations.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have a patron saint of starting vehicles in bitter cold.\u00a0 That seems a void in the saintly register.\u00a0 Perhaps when we have a Canadian pope.\u00a0 Or Siberian.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d be willing to offer the name \u201cSt. Randy\u201d to that unfilled role since there is currently no St. Randy.\u00a0 I have spent many winters trying to start things, so would qualify.\u00a0 Getting some of the old vehicles we\u2019ve had to start counts as a miracle.\u00a0 But apparently there are background checks done in the process of naming a new saint, and those could be problematic.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have to find some other unused name to bless this worthy cause. \u00a0Maybe a St. Russ or St. Jeff.<\/p>\n
All Minnesotans have bad memories of working with jumper cables in dreadful conditions.\u00a0 Red dead to red live; black live to black dead.\u00a0 Lighting up a cigarette is discouraged.\u00a0 Cursing isn\u2019t helpful, but at least won\u2019t cause an explosion.<\/p>\n
Speaking of cursing, who invented the tiny battery posts screwed into the side of the battery with a quarter inch bolthead?\u00a0 Did it ever occur to this genius that the battery might need jumping someday?\u00a0 I try not to think ill of my fellow man.\u00a0 But this guy gets barbed thoughts his direction every time I have to hook up one of those mini-terminals.\u00a0 I say \u201cguy\u201d because I assume a woman would never invent something so dumb.<\/p>\n
Getting cars to start is one thing.\u00a0 Getting ourselves to start at twenty-below isn\u2019t easy either.\u00a0 Some part of you will be exposed when you step out the door.\u00a0 Eyelids hurt if it\u2019s cold enough.\u00a0 Lips and tongue jell up at thirty-below.\u00a0 Noses fall off at forty-below.\u00a0 Gloves are great if you don\u2019t have to do anything with your hands.\u00a0 Then, if you didn\u2019t have to do anything, you would have stayed inside.<\/p>\n
Taking care of animals is another layer of misery.\u00a0 Working on an outdoor hog waterer with ungloved hands in February is not fun.\u00a0 Waterers never have problems in July.<\/p>\n
A more pleasant memory of livestock in the winter is bedding with straw.\u00a0 Given shelter out of the wind and a straw bed, animals make themselves quite comfortable.\u00a0 We made oat straw after the grain was harvested in summer.\u00a0 Part of the warming effect of straw comes from the fact that we baled and stacked it in when it was 100 degrees and muggy.\u00a0 Making those bales in the heat and spreading them in the cold is living in the seasons.<\/p>\n
A couple times a winter, I pull out my dad\u2019s Knipco kerosene heater to unthaw something.\u00a0 I learned to take it apart before turning it on, because the round housing is ideal mouse development property.\u00a0 My Knipco is fifty years old.\u00a0 Fifty years ago, subtlety wasn\u2019t a thing.\u00a0 When you turn that baby on, it roars and blasts enough hot air to melt a small iceberg.<\/p>\n
I looked it up once, and the average temperature around here for the whole year is about 50 degrees.\u00a0 Fifty is okay.\u00a0 We could live comfortably at that temperature.\u00a0 But would we want to?\u00a0 Average would be like the Twins finishing every season with 81 wins and 81 losses.\u00a0 Sure, we\u2019d avoid those ugly years when they\u2019re 30 games out by Labor Day.\u00a0 But there wouldn\u2019t be a 1987 or 1991 with those stacks of memories.\u00a0 I guess we\u2019ll take this week of frigid and a week of sweltering in July to make life interesting.<\/p>\n
Speaking of average, there comes the time to set the thermostat before bed.\u00a0 Pam would like it at 90 and I\u2019d like it at 50, so we set it somewhere in the middle.\u00a0 I get up early and turn it up for her.\u00a0 I know she dreads pulling covers back and stepping into chill air.\u00a0 One of these days I\u2019m going to put the Knipco up in our bedroom and turn that on when I get up.\u00a0 She\u2019d like that.<\/p>\n
Last time I stepped outside and felt the life-sucking cold on my face, I had this thought.\u00a0 What if this is all a hoax?\u00a0 What if this weather is really the construct of MSM, Mainstream Meteorology?\u00a0 After all, how many times has your weatherman lied to you?\u00a0 It\u2019s possible this is the latest working of the Deep-Frozen State.\u00a0 Or even that shady anarchist group Antifafreeze?\u00a0 CoolAnon is working on pulling back the curtain on this fraudulent weather.\u00a0 Stop the Cold!<\/p>\n
Then again, maybe my brain has frost bite.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A few times during our oddly moderate winter, I noticed Pam\u2019s Toyota had a slight slug when I started it.\u00a0 If you are a northerner, you notice those things.\u00a0 I was suspicious of the six-year-old battery. Our winter is no longer \u201cmoderate.\u201d\u00a0 Sure enough, after the car sat in below-zero temps, I went to start …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 08:56:34","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122239,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122238\/revisions\/122239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}