Of course, nobody really enjoys shoveling snow, so to make the chore just a little easier for our frostbitten friends, here are a few helpful tips that are sure to make an afternoon of snow removal as simple and carefree as a day at the beach!

1. Be sure to wear proper attire – reliable footwear in particular is essential to a productive experience.

© viperagp / Depositphotos

2. Use the right equipment for the job, and if you can harness a bit of mechanical assistance, all the better.

© Mustang_79 / Depositphotos

3. Try not to think about the weather as you focus dutifully on the task at hand.

© hydromet / Depositphotos

4. Work with your hips – don’t rely on your back to do all of the heavy lifting.

© Kzenon / Depositphotos

5. Don’t be afraid to put your kids to work.

© mvaligursky / Depositphotos

6. Know when to take the occasional break to help warm up.

© Maridav / Depositphotos

7. Invite some friends over because as they say, many hands make light work.

© yanlev / Depositphotos

8. And lastly, take a moment to celebrate with a refreshing drink when you’re finally done – you’ve earned it!

© Kesu01 / Depositphotos

The post Just Laugh’s Guide to Shoveling Snow appeared first on Just Laugh.

Here in the Gulf of Mexico on the Florida coast if it’s not sharks, it’s flesh-eating bacteria. And if it’s not flesh-eating bacteria, it’s overly ambitious manatees with nothing left to lose…

Dolphins? Sure, they always seem friendly and helpful on TV, but have you ever seen the teeth on a dolphin?! Sharp enough to cut through a can of corn like it was Thanksgiving!

Shrimp and crabs? Not all of them sing and dance like they did in The Little Mermaid!

The point is, there are plenty of deadly things to keep us out of the water on a given day, but we always go to the beach anyways because, well, did you see how freaking hot it was outside today?! The thermometer in my car just barely sputtered out 95 degrees before telling me I could find it hanging out in the refrigerator if I needed anything else!

I have a rule in the summertime that if I’m not being pleasantly chilled by air conditioning indoors, I’m either submersed in water up to my neck or sipping on a tropical drink with ice cubes in it … or preferably both, if the lifeguard isn’t being a jerk about taking drinks in the pool! But either way, Florida summers were never meant to be spent directly out underneath the scorching sun without the refreshment of swimming to make you forget the fact that your skin is slowly sizzling like the outside of a baked potato.

Besides, that thick and leathery, perpetually-tanned skin makes it tougher for the sharks to bite through, anyways…

I suppose just like we’ve grown used to the hurricanes that threaten to rip the roofs from our houses and the tourists who threaten to stop right in the middle of the sidewalk because apparently walking works differently in every other part of the country, we too have become conditioned to shrug off the terrifying taunts that our deep blue beaches have to offer, and not under the guise of bravery or courage or even an unyielding desire to gawk at babes in bikinis as long as our wives are presumably looking the other way.

When a man is swelteringly hot and every second spent out in the sun produces enough sweat to wet down the family station wagon, a little shark nibble or losing a layer or two of skin to hungry bacteria simply just isn’t that bad in consideration of the cool and refreshing offering that slightly less scalding 90 degree waters bring to the table on your typical, Florida summer’s afternoon.

Now don’t get me wrong – when the temperatures dip back into the more comfortable 70s later on this fall???

Sharks and flesh-eating bacteria are absolutely terrifying then!

The post Just Another Death-Defying Day at the Beach appeared first on Just Laugh.

In some places, that coldness has even dropped down into negative numbers, which shouldn’t even be legal as far as we’re concerned! Nonetheless, until you’re all able to dig yourselves out and migrate properly to warmer climates, here are a few tips to help you survive when it’s -17 degrees outside…

• Stay inside.
• Put some pants on.
• Befriend a bear to snuggle with at night. The furry, brown kind, not the gay kind. Although honestly either one would probably work.
• Debate ironically about the existence of climate change to keep that blood boiling strong.
• Take a bath in hot chocolate. With giant marshmallows. Because when else will that sound like a relatively sane idea?!
• Grow a beard and invite woodland creatures to take refuge in its gnarly roughage, their own collective body heat serving to warm you like nature’s furnace.
• Consider insulating your tiled floors with Ready-to-Eat pepperoni pizzas from Little Caesars, both to serve as an economical form of sustenance as well as to prevent even a single, solitary square inch of those icy tiles from being open and exposed to unsuspecting tootsies.
• Burrow deep into the Earth’s crust like any self-respecting mammal and hibernate until this crazy shit is finally past us for another year.

The post How to Survive When It’s -17 Degrees Outside… appeared first on Just Laugh.

I think I can safely speak for just about all of us up here in the Great White North when I say that spring fever has definitely begun to take its toll! This is actually the first year in a few that I haven’t gone anywhere for spring break and I must say that it’s kinda depressing…the only bikinis I’ve seen have either been onMTV or in the Victoria’s Secret catalog and that just ain’t good enough for your average, studly man like myself! Scattered around the most beautiful, tropical regions in the world right now are some of the wildest, craziest beach parties my generation will ever know, and yet I’m stuck up here in the frozen tundra known to me and countless others as home. I’m just about to the point where I’m considering buying one of those special tapes that you see late at night on cable, but my luck I’d end up seeing some girl that I went to high school with and just end up getting even more jealous yet!

So I guess the question of the hour is really this – where in the world is Carmen San Diego??? Wait, that’s not right…how about – what in tar nation can the rest of us do to help shake this spring fever, while all of our friends are off shakin’ their groove-thangs in much more desirable climates?! Well, I’ve been pondering this exact question for the past three weeks over a steady supply of pizza, beer, and The Simpsons, and even though I haven’t technically been able to come up with an answer, I’d be nonetheless more than happy to simply make something up on the spot to satisfy your curiosity…I think you deserve that at least! The answer, my friends, lies in the subtle art of doing nothing. Don’t worry – I actually have put a little thought into this one… (emphasis on little)

Ok, so the secret to not putting your head in the blender when you’re still experiencing temperatures in the single digits well into the months of March and April, and quite possibly even May, might not exactly be all about doing nothing until it gets warmer, but it should still play a strong role in your approach nonetheless. Consider this – if you’re anything like me, you’ve most likely made a routine out of spending the next several months immediately following Christmas by actually paying for everything that you couldn’t afford but bought anyways because it was on sale. Factor in a few hours split between watching television and looking at porno on the Internet and you’ve pretty much got a full schedule…at least for a few months until your brain begins to cave in from the monotony and absolute boredom that you’re subjecting it to. It should appear to be a steam-roller of an easy fix at this point, but for those of you who need it spelled out for you – mix it up a little bit, for heaven’s sake!

I think a lot of people mistakenly understand that the whole concept of spring fever stems from the fact that it’s no doubt warmer in every other part of the world than it is in your own little hole, so it would only make sense that you just need to get out more, right? Well, maybe, but that’s an entirely different column altogether! Of course, after taking into consideration that people that live inCalifornia and Florida and South Africa find themselves going through the same thing, too, the light becomes even more obvious that perhaps the solution isn’t about where you are, but what you are doing in the first place… What’s that, you say? You haven’t really been doing anything lately anyways? Now we’re getting somewhere…

It’s really quite simple, Watson – you simply need to stop doing whatever you’re doing now and go do something else…unless it happens to involve heavy machinery – then, by all means, make sure that the bulldozer or eighteen-wheeler has come to a complete stop before proceeding! If you really have been sitting around on your ass for the past several months, scrape your behind off the couch, clean up any nominal residue, and go seize the day – whether it be rolling around in the front yard, conquering some third-world country, or just getting a job (…we’re not going to support you forever!), you’ll honestly feel better at the end of the day and believe it or not, Sally Jesse Raphael will go on without you! On the other hand, though, if you’ve already been out actually doing stuff and all that jazz, then by all means take an afternoon off to gouge yourself in-front of the TV with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s – you deserve it, plus it’ll make that lunatic friend of yours who actually is rolling around in the front yard right now truly green with envy!

I could go on and on about ways for you to shake the blues without first applying for a third mortgage on the house, but that sounds like the mailman at the door with my own cure for spring fever – The Ultimate Girls Gone Wild Spring Break Collection, featuring Brazilian Bosoms, After-School Specials, The Girls of the Route 4 IHOP, plus all of the classics digitally-remastered on 7 DVDs! (as narrated by Snoop Doggy Dog and Paul Ruebens)

What can I say – I’m a simple man…

The post The Coming of Spring appeared first on Just Laugh.

“There I was, waiting patiently for the cashier to check me out – a gallon of milk and a couple of burritos for dinner that night. The burritos just weren’t ringing up correctly, so the cashier had made the call for a price check – no big deal,” McCallister explained. “The cashier, Tom, tries to make a little small-talk to kill some time and mentioned something about the weather that we had been having lately. I didn’t mention my research, as it tends to confuse most folks, but I agreed that it was pretty toasty outside and went back to reading the various tabloids. It was then that I heard her voice…”

She was a tiny old lady – must’ve been pushing 75 years old. She had a bottle of cheap whiskey clutched in one hand and a carton of cigarettes in the other, and as she attempted to speak, I could tell that it had been a life-long habit, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity…”

I just nodded and pretended to ignore her, but my mind raced with both excitement and disappointment…she was right. I’d been focusing my studies for years and years on weather patterns and climatic changes, yet some old lady who was only moments away from the afterlife summed it up in nine words. I was on the verge of a breakdown, but then another voice broke my concentration…

“That’ll be $3.24 – would you like to drive up?”

The post Ground-Breaking Discovery: “It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity…” appeared first on Just Laugh.

You see, I live in Northern Michigan (current weather conditions: sucky, increasing to total crap by nightfall). Normally it’s a great place to be – there’s virtually no crime, the scenery is absolutely beautiful and the majority of the people are pretty easy to get along with, but don’t get your hopes up just yet. Sure, I’ve even got the legendary Alpenfest right in my back yard every single year, but there’s one tiny catch that bitters even this icing on the cake…

The other night I woke up at about three in the morning to get a late-night snack. After making my selection from the fridge, I turned around and mistakenly got a glimpse out the window. There was snow on the ground – white, cold, evil snow. I stood there for ten minutes trying to figure it out myself, after which I had finished my sandwich and decided that it was time to stumble back to bed.

If you’re confused by this point, let me explain: this is spring – the end of April even! Two days prior, the temperatures got up to eighty-five degrees during the day and barely below sixty at night, and now we’re back to decking the halls and preparing ourselves for the jolly, old, fat man. Hell, I haven’t even finished taking my Christmas lights down yet, and now there’s reason enough to start putting them back up again! I had even impressed myself (along with half of the neighborhood!) by getting a head-start on raking the yard before the city had to send the threatening letters, and now it’s all buried underneath that fluffy, white crap…where’s the love here?!?!?!

I don’t even know why we even have “weathermen” up here because out of all the reports I’ve heard over my years, exactly three of them have been accurate and two of them were while I was on vacation in a different state! It’s like the equivalent of me practicing antique furniture restoration or professional football and actually being serious about it. Of course, there was that stint back in high school…yep, they used to call me “Shotgun-Arm Scotty,” but that’s another story altogether…

Where was I, anyways? Oh yeah, that’s right – the weather up here is completely unpredictable and generally sucky. (as if our board of tourism doesn’t hate me enough already!) It wouldn’t be nearly as bad if only Mother Nature would make up her mind once in a while and just pick a season…preferably one of the ones that doesn’t have much snow in it. I say much because as any Northern Michigan resident knows, winter is always right around the corner…and it’s usually packing heat, or cold in this case…

So you still want to make the trip up north this year, eh? Well, as much as I rant on and on about my anti-tourism ideals, deep in my heart I realize that the economy of this little community depends on the exchange of your hard-earned dollars for our trinkets and do-dads to survive (that, and I’ll be reading about it in the paper for the next year and a half if tourism is down…), so here’s my contribution to the cause. Below I’ve compiled a packing list to prepare you for your journey into the Great White North. It’s good for just about any time of the year and I personally guarantee that everything you could possibly need for such an adventure is included in my list. (not really) Feel free to print it out and give it to all of your friends – maybe as a going away present because chances are they’re never going to see you again…

Aren’t there bears “outside”???

• Warm-weather clothing (shorts, t-shirts, bug spray, etc…)
• Cold-weather clothing (long pants, sweat shirts, bug spray)
• Really cold-weather clothing (thermal underwear, sweaters, fuzzy hat)
• Full range of jackets (wind-breaker, spring, rain, winter, ski, arctic exploration)
• Footwear (hiking boots, galoshes, waders, walking shoes, running shoes, snow shoes, bowling shoes, ski boots, mukluks)
• Socks
• Umbrella (like it’ll matter…)
• Sunglasses
• Big, floppy “tourist” hat
• Over-sized fanny pack (if you’re ultra cool, go for the leather one…)
• A map of a neighboring state (it’ll be just as confusing – trust me!)
• A gigantic cooler, filled with more food than your entire family could eat in a month
• Camera (because you’ll definitely want to capture the whole thing on tape)
• Video camera (it picks up the crying and arguing much better than ordinary film)
• Ear plugs (“Are we there yet?!?!?!”)
• Cyanide capsules (just in case…)

• All of your credit cards

Just remember – Michigan is the one shaped like a hand…reaching out to take all of your money. Hope to see you all real soon!!!

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