Turkey, Pie, and the First Icy Slap of Minnesota Winter

 

Turkey, Pie, and the First Icy Slap of Minnesota Winter

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for November 30, 2025

We got our first real snowfall of the season this week, just enough to cover Prior Lake and everything around it in that delightful blanket of Minnesota reality. The lake isn’t frozen yet, but the evil white stuff showed up anyway like it had a schedule to keep. Every year I swear this is my last winter here, and every spring I magically forget I ever said that. It’s a toxic relationship at this point, but at least the scenery pretends to look peaceful while it ruins my mood.

Monday and Tuesday I was back at Mayo for my annual cardiology check on the aortic aneurysm. Luckily nothing has grown, so I get to breathe easy for another year. The MRI was the only hiccup. I thought I’d be calmer this time, but the second they slid me in, the panic hit like clockwork. It’s basically a human-sized oven you get shoved into while someone bangs pots and pans around your head. But the results were good, I made it through, and the panic button stayed untouched… somehow.

Tuesday night took us to Portia’s 60th birthday bash at Brianno’s Chart House, where we got dinner, bingo, and a reminder that none of us are getting any younger. Portia and Mike threw a great party, the jackpots were big enough to get the room buzzing, and of course I didn’t win a thing. Still, celebrating Portia hitting the big 6-0 with good friends made losing feel almost respectable.

For the first time in what feels like years, we actually spent Thanksgiving at home. Miss Sheri put together an incredible meal, and we got to share it with Luke, Avery, Abby, and Grandma Linda. It was a simple, easy weekend of food, family, and hanging out… and honestly, it reminded me how lucky we are to have moments like this. We really are blessed, and I’m grateful for every bit of it.

We used to spend Black Friday running around stores, but online shopping has pretty much cured us of that tradition. This year we wanted to do something a little more uplifting, so we headed to the Science Museum in St. Paul. We hadn’t been there in years, and it was fun wandering through the exhibits and pretending we remembered anything about dinosaurs. Definitely beats getting into fistfights over an $89 seventy-five-inch TV.

The highlight of the day was hitting the Omnitheater, home of that ridiculous 90-foot domed screen that basically swallows your entire field of vision and dares your eyes to keep up. We watched the new T. REX film, and it was genuinely cool, especially the moment they show how massive these things really were — the kind of shot that makes you realize we wouldn’t have survived five minutes back then.

Saturday afternoon brought us to Target Center, and of course we had to plow through a mini-blizzard to get there. Not enough snow to cancel anything, just enough to be annoying and make you question your life choices. Still, we made it, crossed our fingers, and hoped the Timberwolves would make the drive feel worth it.

I was there with my best gal, and Miss Sheri was fired up because she loves the Timberwolves. We were ready to cheer, yell, and hopefully shake off a few of the extra holiday calories we’d been hauling around since Thursday.

We were hopeful the Wolves would get back to their winning ways, especially after dropping three straight where they kept blowing big leads to the Suns and Kings and then let OKC finish them off in the final minutes. It’s been a rough little stretch, the kind that makes you wonder if the team secretly hates prosperity, but we showed up anyway hoping this would be the night they remembered how to close a game.

The Wolves pulled out a 119–115 win, thanks to Ant dropping 39 and finally taking down a winning team for the first time this season. After a week of snow, doctor visits, holiday food comas, family time, and everything else life threw at us, it felt pretty great to cap it all off with a solid Minnesota win. Now if we could just figure out how to get the Vikings to do the same, this state might actually let us enjoy sports again.

@toddswank The Science Museum of Minnesota is now much more exciting when we can use AI to bring everything to life! #dinosaurs #science #museum #imagetovideo #minnesota ♬ som original - DjNando