My neighbor was not an Eagle Scout

Lots of snow + A semi-warm day + overnight freezing + thingy jigger = Irritating wake-up call.

Professor Wolfman is in the room, children please take your seat. And for the seventh time, spit out that gum! Ok, settle down, let's work on the day's equation.

Lots of snow

Now, as has been mentioned, we have had two significant snowstorms in less than a week's time. Our hefty association dues in our development cover snow removal from roads, sidewalks, and stairwells. The catch being that if there is something in the plow's way, they can't plow. While this may seem obvious and may nudge you to get your vehicle out of its way, failure to do so will cause tremendous strife on your part as you now have to dig out your own pavement.

A semi-warm day

While there was no need to bust out the shorts, yesterday's sunshine led to a semi-warm day for Minneapolis. Some of the snow, particularly that in the sun's direct light melted a bit.

Overnight freezing

With the clear skies that brought us the delicious sunshine, we also were without the benefit of our cloudy blanket. As such, temperatures dropped into the single digits and wind chills were below zero. The snow that had melted during the day froze making roads nice and icy.

Thingy-jigger

Becky and I really have no need for an alarm clock here at our humble abode. Every weekday morning at precisely 6am, we are blessed to have a natural phenomenon gently nudge us awake.

The natural phenomenon? A thingy-jigger.

What? You don't know what a thingy-jigger is?

Truth be told, I'm not sure either. As has been outlined previously, my knowledge of cars stops at "at has four wheels and an engine." Everything else is up for grabs as I couldn't differentiate a carberator from a grilled cheese sandwich.

Notwithstanding, our neighbor has a thingy-jigger on his car. It looks like some kind of contraption that enlarges the exhaust pipe and sounds like a muffler has been ripped off the car. The bottom line here is that it makes a tremendous amount of noise. Most aggravating is that its intentional. The car looks like its worth about $200.00 and yet somewhere in the car's life, the owner decided that instead of investing in anything that's actually needed - hubcaps, windshield, hell a down payment on (gasp!) another car - the owner(s) decided to get something that makes an aggravating amount of noise when the gas pedal is pressed. Kind of an infant's mentality, really. Oooh, noise!!!

So every 6am, Becky and I our blessed to have our neighbor wake us up as he speeds off to work with his thingy-jigger broadcasting his whereabouts. This morning, though, was a little bit different.

The car in question never sits in the garage, but rather in the driveway. Said car also has not left the driveway since the snowstorm. Come this morning and the weather mentioned above, the car was unable to happily wake up the neighborhood on its way to work with a squirt of carbon dioxide. No, the car got stuck at the end of the driveway that had not been plowed and was now and icy disaster.

After 7 minutes of flooring the accelerator, my neighbor caused me to physically get out of bed to watch the debacle. Two individuals were taking plastic shovels and were attempting to chip away at the ice that had encrusted the wheels.

With my head shaking of disgust I returned to my bed where my true alarm had not yet gone off and laid there. I waited, listened, and watched the clock. Becky at one point suggested we go out there and help with some salt or something. She's a good woman, and I clearly am not as demonstrated by my unhesitating reply, "Absolutely not."

After 17 minutes of working the damn thingy-jig until its heart was about to explode, the car broke free and gleefully sped off to work.

Test Tuesday. Class dismissed.