It’s official. I can’t be a member of Idaho Jeep Girls for two glaring reasons: I don’t own a Jeep and I’m not a girl. Despite my attempts at haggling and offering to trade in my Subaru for the famed four-wheel drive, nothing could convince members to let me join.

Alas, I’ll have to find another group that will take me. Maybe the Shriners are recruiting…

Crossing deep snow is a pain in the you-know-what. Since our ancestors didn’t have four-wheel drives and Whole Foods with stocked shelves, they were forced to invent efficient ways to cross snow effectively to hunt and forage. In modern Russia, archaeologists have found skis that date back as far as 8,000 BCE, so the method has been around for a while.

Always looking for new ways to get sore muscles, my girlfriend and I decided to try out some skate skiing. But before we get into that fiasco, let’s start with the basics.

Famed financial guru, Dave Ramsey, says you shouldn’t buy a new car “unless you’re a millionaire.” According to a study of 10,000 millionaires, he said, the people questioned in the study said they did not buy a new car in the years leading up to their financial success.

“They just said, ‘We’re not putting our money in crap that goes down in value and then scratch our heads and wonder why we’re not millionaires,’” Ramsey said.

After donning my climbing shoes and tightening my harness, I attached myself to an auto belay carabiner, grasped a nearby outcropping, and began pulling myself up a 45-foot wall at The Commons climbing gym.

Halfway up the knobby embankment, I was out of breath, my forearms burned and my fingers ached as I searched frantically for footholds below like I was climbing a prison wall to freedom. Also, I knew there was a climber watching me from a bench below and I certainly wasn’t going to look like a wuss, so I forged on to the top.

For the last six years, since my 2014 Subaru Outback rolled out of the factory, that yellow orb in the sky we affectionately call the sun has conspired to destroy my car’s headlights. You see, despite the sun being 93 million miles away, it emits harmful ultraviolet rays that burn my fair Irish skin and erode the plastic on my car’s headlights giving them a hazy, foggy appearance.

Fortunately my fellow homosapiens have developed easily accessible technology to cure ailing headlights. With this in mind, I headed down the road to my friendly neighborhood auto parts locale and picked up a headlight restoration kit.