I've lived in Minnesota all my life. The most important part of surviving winter here is to learn to enjoy it. If you stay inside waiting for spring, you won't make it as a Minnesotan. Find a winter sport to enjoy, and you'll start looking forward to the white stuff! For me, it's snowboarding. There's also downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, skating, hockey, broom-ball, ice fishing, snowmobiliing. They even race cars on the frozen lakes!

In my opinion, once the temperature stays consistently below freezing, it's a lot easier to tolerate. 35 degrees and raining is about as miserable as weather gets, and if that's as cold as you're used to, you can only imagine that colder is even worse- but it's not! Below freezing you stay dry if you dress right.

Learn how to drive in snow and ice! Go to a snowy parking lot and practice driving with the hand-brake on if you've got front-wheel drive. And remember 4-wheel drive vehicle helps you get going, but it doesn't help you stop.

The real season I have trouble with is our current one- ROAD CONSTRUCTION. I think they should just shut down the entire state for a month, and everybody gets assigned to work at the nearest road crew. What we've got is pretty close to that, but they're pretending we can go about our business as usual.