Open Letter to All Minnesotans

Now hear this.

It's not that cold. Quit your whining.

I moved here from North Dakota in 1985. In these 19 winters, I have yet to encounter weather I'd call anything but "wintery"; for my tastes, winters here are a little too wussy.

Snow? -10 lows for day on end? Where I grew up, we call that "Skinny-dipping weather". We don't even button our jackets if it's above 0. To hear the caterwauling of Minnesotans is equal parts amusing and pathetic.

When you have a howling north wind for three weeks in a row, and temperatures that never crack -10 for highs in that time - as seemed to happen every January when i was a kid - give my people a call. Until then, we'll be busy remember the real winters, back where people might not know a mocha from a capuccino, but we surely do know our weather.

And even if you pull him in from a snowdrift with blue lips and chattering teeth, you will never hear a North Dakotan admit otherwise to a Minnesotan.

Not that we'll ever need to.

< mumble > pansies < / mumble > Sheesh, people.

That is all.