Editorial: Thumbs

Published 3:22 pm Saturday, January 22, 2011

Editorial Thumbs

To people who help get other people’s cars unstuck from drifts.

It’s difficult enough to get your own car unstuck from snowdrifts, snowplow piles at the ends of driveways, shallow ditches and the various other places that cars find themselves stuck in during the snowy months of December, January and February. It’s quite an altruistic act to help another driver out of a similar jam. Yet people in Albert Lea and across the Upper Midwest just do it. They just help people. It’s in their very nature.

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That’s why American Upper Midwesterners are the best people in the world.

To 26 degrees below zero.

Garrison Keillor jokes that in Minnesota people need not travel to other places because other places come to Minnesota. For instance, on Thursday and Friday the Arctic Circle came through for a visit. On Friday morning, the air temperature in Albert Lea was 26 degrees below zero at 7 a.m.

We are hardy folk here in Minnesota, but that is far too cold for most anyone. We are now officially ready to see a springtime visit from either the Gulf of Mexico or the American Southwest.

To Youth for Christ.

It was good to see children doing their part to make the city a safer place. They were out there on Friday, the coldest day of winter so far, to dig out fire hydrants so that firefighters can hook fire hoses onto them in case of a blaze that need to be extinguished. The children were part of Youth for Christ’s The Rock, which is known mainly for its after-school program downtown.