Colorado vs. Minnesota

For those of you who aren't aware, my friend who leaves comments on my blog under the identity "Nonna" used to be my boss up in Minnesota some years back. She has had to listen to me piss and moan about many things through the years, not just about the cold, and for that I'm truly sorry. She was a real trooper to put up with all that bitching. But I will never apologize for crabbing about the Minnesota winter.

The day she is referring to in her comment was a very long time ago. I had come to Minneapolis for a class. The hotel I stayed in was next door to the building where the class was held. The high temperature that day was four degrees below zero. Let's go over that again. The high temperature that day was four degrees below zero. A co-worker and I found that we had to run from the hotel to the classroom next door to avoid the severe pain that stung our exposed skin during the unbearable two minute commute.

Some years later when she hired me, she chose a week for me to come up and work with her in her office. Yep, you guessed it, smack in the dead of winter. I'll never forget flying out of Minneapolis, seeing the lifeless frozen tundra stretching out for hundreds of miles in every direction as I departed by air at the end of my week there. When I arrived back in Las Vegas to a balmy winter evening, I opened my car's sunroof and sighed with relief. I swore I would never travel to Minnesota again during the winter.

If you ask me, and even if you don't - it's my blog, Minnesota in the winter is not exactly the picture of a winter wonderland. It's more like the inside of an old freezer that hasn't been defrosted in several years. It's a place where they boast about the number of indoor passageways they have between buildings, always forgetting to mention that if people were forced to walk outdoors, they would lose appendages to frostbite.

I'll always love my dear friend Nonna, but if she thinks that a Minnesota winter can be compared to a Colorado winter, she's crazy. Poor crazy Nonna. That's what they'll call her. Oh, did I forget to mention that it will be sunny and in middle 50's in Denver this weekend? The high in Minneapolis today you ask? 19.