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After my post last week about our trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan, Mark Goodyear asked me (see the comments) “You did hate the winters in Michigan, though, right?” To which my reply would be:

Interesting question!

See, whenever we moved to a new place (I’ve worked a lot of contract projects over the years), there’s a process we go through to in order to locate and settle into our new digs.

Before we even leave town, I first locate the job site (man, this Internet thing is pretty cool, eh?), then find a decent hotel nearby for our initial few days. (By that I mean safe and, well, appropriate. Once, we were assigned to a hotel that turned out to be located between two strip joints! Needless to say we, uh, didn’t stay there.)

Then we’d load up the car (we had a Mercury Marquis station wagon; a land yacht if there ever was one) and drive to wherever it was. You might be wondering, What on earth did they take with them? Well, our philosophy was, if it didn’t fit in the car, we didn’t need it, which actually worked pretty well…

After arriving at the new town, we purchased newspapers and a map for our apartment search, which normally took no more than a week (Mrs. MZM would drop me off at work and do this during the day.) Usually there was a decent selection of “Corporate” (which is a fancy-dancy name for “furnished”) apartments, so choosing one wasn’t a big deal.

THEN… we could begin exploring the new town and start seeing the sights.

OK, got the picture? Believe me, once you’ve done this a few times, it becomes pretty much routine. (At least, as routine as it could be. Uh, did I mention – we’ve moved 62 times in the last 25 years? Seriously, Mrs. MZM is a Saint, lemme tell ya!)

Anyway, one day we were driving around Kalamazoo, just checking things out when we noticed something really odd. Attached to every fire hydrant was a tall metal rod, about six or eight feet tall. What the heck?

Then suddenly it dawned on us (sound of heart sinking) – they were so the fire department could find their hydrants when buried in deep snow (sound of terrified scream)! Yikes! What kind of crazy frozen wasteland had we gotten ourselves into?

We had visions of frigid winds blowing snowdrifts as high as a house, people bundled up like Eskimos, frostbite… (Brrrr! I’m gettin’ chilly just thinkin’ about it!) Well, needless to say, it put a real damper on our spirits for awhile, and I remember thinking, “Hey, maybe those guys were right!”

Well, here’s the thing…

In an ironic twist of fate (ironic, as you know, is an ancient Chinese expression that means made entirely of iron), it turned out all our worrying had been for naught. The job ended much earlier than anyone expected, and we made it back to the sunny skies of Texas about early September.

So Mark, I guess we DID enjoy the winter after all. It just happened to be in Houston instead of Kalamazoo!

Whew, dodged a bullet that time!

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