REALLY Wintery Weekend

We spent the weekend on the river and it was REALLY REALLY cold.  This is life in Minnesota.  My eyes tear at the sting of frozen air and then, from the moisture of that tear-up, my eyelashes frost and I know they will freeze shut if I blink.  In town the city truck plows the snow to the center of the street, separating the south and northbound traffic.  There isn't much snow this year so, as you drive one direction, you can still see the drivers going the opposite way.  Mark and I stopped at the gas station to buy a few scratch off lottery tickets.  Last June, for Father's Day, our niece gave Mark five scratch off tickets.  He scratched the little waxy fish off to reveal his winnings.  We were at the river then and so brought them into town and exchanged the winning tickets for new ones.  After scratching them off we decided not to exchange for new ones until our next visit.  We've (Mark lets us play too!) been playing this game since last June, always winning a little something to buy more tickets.  So, there were five winning tickets waiting for us when we arrived this past weekend - $5 - five more tickets.  The tickets are what Mark and I stopped in town to get when I took this photo.

(This isn't a black and white photo - I think even the color is frozen)  Everything is frozen.  I know I'm getting older when drastic weather like this fills me with - not contented glee at being sequestered to a warm living room - but with an overbearing awareness of our vulnerability.  This is us against nature and we are overly dependant on tools (furnaces, coats, boots, homes!).  There are many little things that could go wrong, leaving us in a lot of trouble.  So I appreciate, greatly, the luxeries I have and I packed as many as I could with me, everywhere I went this weekend - just in case.

Being sequestered to a warm living room is actually quite nice but...we start to go a little nuts after awhile.  The first two days were fine for outdoor play but on the third day, we drove, followed different maps to different frozen lakes.  Many lakes had multiple ice fishing houses on them, some even had hundreds.  But this lake had only one little red house way out there.  So secluded and pretty.

As the sun rose on our last day, the temperature was thirty-four degrees below zero.  That is not the wind chill, that is THE temperature.  We scratched off four of the five lottery cards the day before and won nothing.  As we began to scratch off the last card, each of us taking a turn, we realized that our run might be over.  This might be it, our last card.  Well, it was six months of fun - pretty good gift.  When there was only one little square left to scratch, we decided that - maybe - it was a bad idea to be gambling on a Sunday and so we set the card aside until Monday morning.  (this was very hard for the younger ones of us).  On Monday morning, as the sun was rising and the temperature dropping, Kate scratched the last square to reveal a $1 win!  Yay!!  We play on!