Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. When I was a kid growing up in

Iowa I lived by a lake and in the winter the lake could get frozen over solid

so that you could actually walk on it and when it got really hard,

you could even drive on it.

Well, it was on one of those cold wintery days

that I decided I'd take my parents' car, drive it out to the lake and spin it around.

That sounded like a lot of fun to me.

Well, I drove onto the lake and immediately I got stuck.

I was just stuck in a snow bank and I couldn't move the car.

I couldn't go anywhere. I was really stuck.

And this was pre-Sell-phone day so I had to walk over to someone's house, use their phone, and call my dad and tell him what happened.

But when I got him, you may think he yelled at me, he screamed at me, called me stupid.

Nope, he didn't do any of those things. He just kind of chuckled and said, well, take care of it, son.

That's all he said.

And I had to call a tow truck and tow my parents car out of the snowbank and I had to pay for that tow truck with my

part-time job that I had that wasn't very much money. So it was a learning experience.

And I remember I wasn't self-critical, but it was expensive.

So it had a little bit of a bite to it.

But I said, well, better not do that again.

And I didn't.

But I actually did get the car stuck, I think three more more times and this time it was in ditches.

I would be driving on a wintery day when I shouldn't have been and it'd go right into the ditch

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