What a fun and busy post, in spite of the frustrating day!
My sister was driving Mom and me in a rental car on a snowy day last week, and the road kept kicking up dirty snow onto the windshield. She couldn't find the washer fluid button so I did - and the liquid immediate turned to ice on the windshield. Oops. She had to pull over and scrape. That could have gone badly, but luckily, we're native Midwesterners, the kind Barry Aitchison described so picturesquely in his novel Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes & Further Arcane Inducements to Wonder. Within the novel, “The Small Town Musings of Russel Cowes” explains the “permanently stunned look” that causes Midwesterners to appear stupid. Settlers of the Great Plains “endured the worst weather nature can whip up,” such as the blizzard of 1888, 40-below-zero winters, hot, arid summers, prairie fires, grasshopper plagues, dust storms, floods and tornadoes. “Wouldn’t all that be enough to make your face look like you were expecting the next disaster to come along any minute?”

It makes sense to me. :)