Molly was stuck down in stupid Chicago, or stupid Costa Rica, never gets to have any fun with the kids in Minneapolis. But enough's enough! She called a sledding run a week in advance, and damned if it didn't happen! Sure, it was sunny all day and a lot of the snow melted, but at the golf course the snow was packed down and annealed into a thick shield of polished glass. This, coupled with near-zero visibility due to it being late evening, made for a thrill-packed high-speed adventure into a Nietzschean void! Also there was alcohol.

See, the trick with night sledding on a glossy, slick slope like this is that not only can't you see what's coming up, but you're flying downhill way too fast to control yourself even if you could see it. And at those speeds, any little bump can make a tremendous difference in your path... or your trajectory. You can get whipped back and forth if your ballast isn't arranged correctly (heavy people in front!), and there was a ramp in the middle of the hill that we couldn't always see until three seconds before impact. So, of course, we aimed for where we thought it was and launched ourselves into adventure.

Molly had a bad experience with going twosies on a sled once, in which her wrist was horribly mangled beyond repair beneath a speeding sled (it got better). Alexis was at first uneasy about taking the plunge, herself, for no better reason than she's a girl. However, both of them went down the hill with me on my supernaturally high-performance sled right over the ramp with missile-like precision. We didn't wax out, no one's limbs were crushed, we only tasted success as we screamed in terror all the way down. The terror of victory!