Blogs Dec 12, 2010 at 9:26 am

Comments

1
Yeah, I loved living in Minneapolis, but the excess of snow every winter is something I definitely do not miss.
2
It almost beat the Great Storm of '91. Almost.

At least here we don't have to dig ourselves out of 2" of rain.
3
This is what happens when your QB is a fornicator.
4
What kind of morons build a fabric dome over a stadium in Minneapolis. They do know it snows there, right?
5
@2: aah, yes, the great storm of '91. I was living in Duluth at the time. When you get 36" of snow in October, you know you're in for a long, white winter. (and my work did not close the next day--true Minnesotans, they).
6
God hates football.
7
In Calgary, our stadium roof doubles as a halfpipe when it snows, which makes it a multi-use facility:

http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/photos/cal…
8
Canuck, something about your photo reminds me of the look of our old KIngdome. Here in Seattle, we blew up our aging county-taxpayer-built multipurpose concrete stadium (to clear the way for the new stadiums we helped finance for baseball and football team owners who'd threatened to move them to other cities if we didn't, blah blah).

So we paid to blow the Kingdome up one sunny day. Biggest bang yet of its kind, says Guinness. Look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xLzTKQ4-…
9
Wow, there's something scarily beautiful about all of those ribs starting to vibrate at once, yikes! Man, the money we pour into our sports teams...

Your explosion video made me think about the old Boston Garden, where I used to go see the circus as a kid. There were stories about a monkey people said they saw from time to time during games, or whenever, and they were dismissed as urban legend. Then, when they demolished it (part of the Big Dig? Can't remember?), they found a monkey skeleton. They guessed it had escaped during one of the times the Ringling Bros. were there, and had lived on the food detritus for years...
10
Man, I wish we had monkeys in our old buidings, not to mention mile-long Speedo races in winter. Boston's pretty cool.
11
1/UF, are you from there or did you just live there for a few years?

While I don't miss the bitter cold days back there, I'd take a Twin Cities winter over a sodden depressing Seattle winter (but Seattle wins for the summer* and there aren't any mountains in Minnesota, two main reasons I've never moved back.)

*Seattle also wins for the spring, with the explosion of flowers here, but the fall colors are much better in the Twin Cities.
12
8/gus, it was a travesty to destroy the Kingdome when it was perfectly functional but, on the other hand, I thought it was incredibly hideous so I was happy to see it go for that reason.
13
Roma @11,

I grew up there. Lived in Richfield, MN (a little suburb just south of Minneapolis... birthplace of Best Buy!), then Bloomington for a very short while, then Minneapolis until I moved away in 2001.

The only thing that really bugged me about MN winters is that even though the plows are excellent and on-the-spot immediately, there's just SO MUCH SNOW for so long that it gets annoying. Huge piles that are born in October and don't melt until April. Yeah, no thanks.

Still, winter snow and summer mosquitoes notwithstanding, MN is definitely a great place to live. I've lived in a few cities and Minneapolis is in my top 3 faves.
14
Thanks, UF. Richfield, eh? Yeah, right by the airport. One of my cousins lives there. I knew Best Buy was HQ'ed in the Twin Cities but didn't know it was Richfield specifically.

I grew up in St. Paul (near the State Fair) but lived in Minneapolis for two years, one year in Dinkytown and during my final year of college in a cool old brick apt building on Lagoon Street, near Hennepin & Lake. I loved that Uptown neighborhood.

When I first moved to Seattle, I loved the change in winters. But over the years, the near-constant rain and gloom have really gotten to me and now I'd take the cold and snow. I didn't mind the snow as much as you did (few things more beautiful in life, to me, than a snowfall.) It was the bitter cold that I didn't like.

Yeah the Twin Cities & Minnesota are a great place to live. They always rank very high in those quality-of-life surveys and deservedly so. I was very tempted to stay, because I had job offers from both Republic Airlines and Cargill but I really wanted to be near mountains.

Where do you live now?

15
@14,
Cool, I lived in Dinkytown for a couple years also, first in a house on SE 5th street, and then a block away at an apartment on the corner of 4th and 13th... right next to those big tower apartments there. I used to bike to St. Anthony Main to hang out or watch a movie at that old theater they have there (if it's still there). The last place I lived at in Mpls was NE, right next to the river near Marshall Terrace Park. At the time, I was working at Fairview-Riverside Medical Center and didn't have a car so I had to bike to work... rain, snow, sleet, or hail. I think that may be where my dislike of all the snow came from. Uptown definitely rocks. I would love to have a place there.

I'm in Denver, Colorado right now. I love it so far, although I've only been here a couple months, so I still need to give it some time before I'll know for sure. I lived out in NYC for a while, then Tallahassee, Fl, then Austin, TX. I've been sort of a nomad for some time.
16
@ 11: I grew up in Duluth, then lived in the Cities for about 15 years before moving out here. I miss the snow and ice skating on Isles, but I'll take the rain and temperate air over the frigid cold and sticky hot. Duluth was a grey and miserable place (weather-wise), so growing up there prepared me for Seattle.

This region's weather is a cake walk. It kills me each and every time someone says, "It's so cold!" here. No. It's not. Trust me. Try driving around northern MN in -26 (pre-wind chill) in Dec. and then we can talk cold.

You're spot on about spring here. The constant blooming flowers starting in Feb. is amazing.
17
@6. He certainly must hate the Redskins.
18
15/UF, is this the big tower apartment building you're referring to? If so, that's where I lived. It was a hideous building but I had cheap rent sharing an apartment with three other guys. I'm sure we were in Dinkytown at very different times but it's funny we lived in places right next to each other. I loved St. Anthony Main and that whole area around Nicollet Island. The new Guthrie Theater is in that area (on the south side of the river.) Although the scenery in Seattle is dramatic, I miss not living in a river city. One thing I like about Portland over Seattle is that it's on a river.

When I first moved to Seattle, I was hoping to find a neighborhood like Uptown but Seattle doesn't have anything like it. Capitol Hill is probably the closest thing to it but, unlike Uptown, it's not a couple blocks from a lake. And the neighborhood/business district next to our in-city lake, Greenlake, is pathetic.

Denver, eh? That's always seemed like a very appealing city and I hope you continue to enjoy it. I considered moving there from Minnesota but wanted to be near mountains and the ocean. I was in Austin once, for the Austin City Limits festival in 2004, and loved it, although the heat in the summer would drive me crazy.
19
16/Dod, I never saw much of Duluth. Just drove through it with my family on trips to the North Shore. Interesting that it's so gray in the winter there. One of the things I like about the cold is that it's frequently accompanied by blue skies. Maybe it's more gray in Duluth because it's on Lake Superior? Where did you live in the Twin Cities?

True, we don't get the bitter subzero cold here, but I find the damp cold weather to be bone-chilling. Yeah, spring in Seattle is awesome. When I was 13, we stopped here in the spring on the way back from Anchorage to visit friends of my mother's and that's the one memory I have: flowers and color everywhere. I look forward to it every year.
20
Roma@18, Yeah, I lived right next to that tower! In the apts. on 4th. Funny... Yeah I remember the apts in that tower were always on hold, waiting for whoever was the next U of M student I'm sure. But the Thai restaurant at the bottom was a diamond in the rough. It's probably gone now, but that thai restaurant had the best peanut chicken thai I've ever had. My dinkytown days were short but fun. St. Anthony Main was also a diamond. Live bands at the local bars right on the river was fantastic... I don't know if they still do that there, but it was fun as hell when I was living in the area.

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