Sports writer, Republican Eagle (Red Wing, Minn.)

It's enough....
One winter in New Ulm, not far from Red Wing with all things being equal, there were three weekends of Minnesota winter: 18 inches of snow one Friday-Saturday, an 80-below wind chill on a Saturday that I had to bundle up to walk half a block because the engine block heater had stopped working, and 16-inches of snow on the third Friday-Saturday.
And it was rural.

 

That sucks, you might as well be homeless w/ weather like that and no heat. dang!

 

An engine block heater is different from a heater.
Engine block heaters prevent all the fluids in your snow blower from freezing (as happened to Slappy, my college sports editor, I think).
Heaters prevent you from freezing. Ain't nobody surviving without a heater.

And BTW: Sconnie, your post made my point for me. To non-Midwesterners, any temperature that is under +20 sounds absolutely frigid. Sub-zero windchills? Terrible.

 

My god now there's something I would love to see a video of Slappy ankle deep in snow cussing out his snow blower at the crack of dawn. Too bad it was ages ago because that situation was tailor made for a YouTube situation.

 

Red Wing has a juvenile correction facility. Growing up, any bad behavior in our house was often met with the threat, "You're being sent to Red Wing if you keep this up." I thought it was a joke. Then a kid from our class was sent there. Then he joined the carnival.

Nice town, though.

 

Having spent quite a bit of time in both MN and Florida, I actually think there's a similarity in how the temps make you act.

In a MN winter, you move from heated space to heated space. In a Fla. summer, you move from cooled space to cooled space. In neither extreme situation do you want to spend a lot of idle time hanging around outside.

But yes, if you find 35 degrees to be cause for altering your daily behavior, you don't want to move to the Frozen North.

 

Yeah, but in Florida, you don't have to shovel all the "hot" just to get out of your driveway.

 

And running the air conditioner is much cheaper than running the heater.

 

I always thought running a natural gas furnace is cheaper than running the AC.

 

So, to connect the dots, if you really acted badly you were destined for a life as a carnival worker?