When my wife and I decided to relocate to Texas, we figured that it would be safe to leave behind our snow shovels, ice melt and most everything else that you typically need for a New York winter. Little did we know that our first Texas winter would feature record-breaking cold temperatures. It never dawned on either one of us that our cars would need to be defrosted, much less need the ice scraped off of them before driving in the morning. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea to keep more than one of the multitude of ice scrapers that we owned in New York, but we only kept one.
My wife leaves for work early in the morning, so naturally, we keep our only ice scraper in her car. Most mornings it is not needed, even when it is very cold out. Yesterday, I needed to clear the windows on our other car to take my son to school. As usual, we were pressed for time, and couldn’t wait for the windows to defrost on their own, so I had to improvise.
Last week, when my niece was in town, we all went out to a club (a rare occurrence for us nowadays). On the way to the club, my wife realized that she forgot to put on deodorant. Rather than return home, we just stopped at a supermarket to buy her a new one. For some reason, antiperspirants now come with a plastic cover on them underneath the cap. Luckily for me, my wife left the cover in the cup holder, because it was the only piece of hard plastic that I had to scrape the windows.
As I scraped off the car with my newly-created, inch-long, oval ice scraper, I was thinking that we probably could have squeezed that second ice scraper into the overstuffed minivan that we drove down to Texas in from New York. I was also thinking that this would work better if I were taller, as I was only able to make circles on each side of the windshield, leaving the middle still frozen as I drove my son to school.
While I wish that we had brought another ice scraper with us from New York, at least I learned a valuable lesson from this experience…if you want to do the best possible job – you should make sure that you have the proper tools to do so. And, if you’re going to leave your ice scraper in New York, it’s a good idea to have your wife leave home without deodorant one night so that you too can be a “Modern Day MacGyver!”
Waldo's Life 