It isn’t the typical bachelor story where you take a peek into the bathroom and it appears that all sorts of fungi and molds have taken over most of the flat porcelain surfaces. Nor is it a story about there being only three piles of clothes in the closet, one definitely dirty, one somewhat used and the rest unfolded but clean clothes. It doesn’t even have an anecdote that ends up with the only thing in the refrigerator being a couple of bottles of beer and a some olives.
Nah, this is a short story about a couple of Minnesota bachelors and their struggle against the elements. It isn’t any real secret that Minnesota gets snow and cold every year between October and March. To be honest, it was a surprise even to the residents when it started snowing on Thursday and really didn’t stop until about Saturday.
The result was actually a lot of snow. The official numbers put it about 22 inches for this one snow storm. To complicate things this was the first snow storm of the winter. Neither the city nor the state were really ready for this. Initially I thought that my apartment complex was just a duff organization that was not able to organize the shoveling of snow. Yet after a while it became apparent that this was no ordinary snow storm and our cars were not going anywhere, perhaps not even to work on Monday.
We didn’t have any food and we didn’t live in the big city. We lived about a mile from the town near us and as a couple of bachelors we didn’t really have much in the way of food in the fridge. So without much planning we walked to town and the hardware store was closed, as was the restaurant, actually everything was closed except for a small convenience store and Little Caesars pizza.
So we did the only thing we could, we had pizza and bought some frozen pizzas and a case of coca cola. We only got enough to last the weekend as we felt certain that we would be dug out by then.