Frozen Heater

[On location in Cumberland, Wisconsin]
Merry Christmas, everyone! I haven’t blogged at all lately, but that’s what happens with IPRs, being sick (came down with a sore throat Monday, then a cold on Thursday night, but I’ve been feeling better since Sunday), and traveling and everything. Anyway, I’m in Wisconsin safe and sound, and enjoying a break from driving. Today was the first day in nearly a week where I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car for at least 3 hours! In fact, I haven’t been in a car at all today. It’s been nice to be able to be a bum and just sit around, and read a book, play a little piano, and get my gift for my brother Jake wrapped (my family decided to do the gift exchange this year after all).
My trip to Wisconsin was a bit adventurous. It was snowing some Friday morning, but by the time I loaded up my car, it had switched to a lovely heavy mix of sleet and freezing rain. I left my apartment about 10:30am Friday, and the roads were terrible until about halfway between Clearfield and DuBois, with all the +FZRA/IP. So what should’ve taken an hour to get that far actually took two hours. I even passed a Mustang on PA-970 (the little connector road between US-322 and I-80 just east of Clearfield) while going just 20 mph, haha. I think that has to be a first. 🙂 Fortunately the precip switched to plain rain a few miles after the “Appalachian Divide” on I-80, and the roads weren’t slippery anymore the rest of the way. I had been starting to worry that I wouldn’t make it to Valpo that day, with how long the first 60 miles took.
I got to Valparaiso a bit after 9pm. If I had gotten there a bit earlier and not been exhausted from my cold, we might’ve gone to the ice skating rink with another of Alex’s friends, but as it was we hung out in his dorm for a bit, before Alex & I walked to one of his favorite hangouts in downtown Valparaiso, a classy pub called Pass Times. We had a really fun evening hanging out and celebrating Alex finishing his semester. Good times. $4 Long Islands also were a plus. 😉
And then on Saturday, Alex & I weren’t able to leave Valparaiso until 2:30pm because he had RA responsibilities, with closing up the dorm for Christmas break and whatnot. It had already started snowing when we left, and had to drive slower most of the way. What should’ve been an 8-hour drive in good weather wound up taking almost 12 — we got to my parents’ house at 2:15am. Sometime around Madison my heater also stopped working. I really noticed it when Alex asked at some point, “Say, are you cold?” I guess my coolant didn’t have a high enough proportion of antifreeze (or so my dad suspected initially), so it was only rated to 0 or -10 degrees or something, which meant that my expansion box turned into a block of ice. Fun! Most of the time in Wisconsin that night it was around -10 degrees with a 20 mph wind, gusting to 30-35 mph (meaning the windchill was maybe in the -30s and -40s), so there was plenty of blowing snow too. We were very glad finally to arrive at my parents’ house and warm up. 🙂 And can I add that I really hate it when I’m stuck behind a snowplow, that whenever you try to pass it it suddenly kicks up so much snow that you can’t even see the front of the car (or the bright flashing lights of the snowplow that’s right next to you)? After a couple attempts I decided it wasn’t worth it to try again, especially since we were on US-53 and not too far from home at that point.
Alex & I went with my parents to my oldest brother Nathan’s house on Sunday for house church, and then I drove him back to his family’s place in Mahtomedi, had dinner with them and played a card game of Scat with Alex and his youngest brother Nicholas (seems to be one of Nicholas’s favorite games). After that I drove back up to Cumberland for the night.
I went back to Minnesota on Monday again, but before I even made it to Turtle Lake, my car’s heater went on the fritz again. That means that making antifreeze be a higher proportion of the coolant didn’t do the trick, and that something more serious is wrong with it. Sigh. So I turned around and drove all the way to Chetek to trade cars with my dad, so that I could have a car with a working heater. I hope my car can be fixed, and that I haven’t driven my Mazda for the last time… Anyway, Monday evening I drove out west of the Cities to Lester Prairie to have dinner with Naomi and her family (from my brother Aaron & Eve’s church), which was enjoyable. Because I didn’t want to drive the full three hours back to my house (especially if it snowed, which it did), I spent the night at Alex’s house. It’s been so fun to have a chance to spend lots of time with my best friend again the last few days (and there’ll be more coming up at the end of break, and then again in mid-January at AMS in Phoenix!). I’m continually hoping and praying that he’ll be admitted to Penn State and that we can be roommates in a few months! We’re both looking forward to it so much! 😀
I know that we’re constantly bombarded with stories on the news about how bad the economy is and how stores are suffering with the lack of shoppers and shopping going on. I know this is just anecdotal, but when I was doing some shopping in Roseville on Tuesday afternoon, all the roads and parking lots around all the shopping centers were jam-packed. It may not be the same everywhere else, but at least in Roseville, Minnesota on Tuesday, retailers seemed to be getting a lot of business.
In my last blog post I mentioned that the Christmas party and white elephant gift exchange for Penn State Christian Grads was happening back on the 14th. And guess who was ultimately the lucky recipient of my white elephant gift, a 1987 book by someone named Roger Yepsen entitled “How to Increase Your Brainpower”? If you guessed that I got it back, you guessed right. Is that the sign of a truly great white elephant gift, that it’s so undesirable that it gets traded away multiple times and eventually traded back to the giver? 🙂
Tomorrow my parents are hosting our family Christmas, with Eve and her kids and Nathan & Laura and their kids and Jake all getting here sometime after lunch. I should probably get to bed before too much longer here, since I have to help my parents do a fair bit of cleaning around the house in the morning before everyone arrives.
Merry Christmas! Our Saviour is born!