Minnesota Weather Report

The weather is always an important topic in Minnesota. Look at any Minnesota language textbook, or listen to Prairie Home Companion, and you'll appreciate that knowing how to talk about the weather is key to survival in Minnesota society. I don't often carry that theme over to my blog, but here's an exception.

We had family visiting from New Mexico for a couple of weeks. They arrived just in time for a spell of cool and wet. Really cool. To them, cold. Poor folks; they didn't bring clothes that would pass for them as winter attire and they froze to death.

But a few days ago, there was an almost audible click as the switch flipped to summer. The low temperature this morning was 70 but as I write this at 8:30 it's already up to 82, heading to a high in the mid 90s. The contrast between that and the weather only a week ago is both striking and completely predictable.

In between we had tornados. You might have seen news stories from Austin MN, which is the next town down I90 from us. The storm that hit them appeared on radar only 20 minutes before tornados were spotted. We watched it from our deck as it formed in particularly textbook fashion, and then observed Mother Nature's light show. We had another night of tornados a few days ago, with a couple of touchdowns reported in our county. Luckily the path of both of these storms missed the most heavily populated areas but it could have been much worse – and no doubt will be.

Meanwhile we continue to equip our new Red Cross trailer with disaster supplies. It's essentially done; we have a little tweaking to do with the tie-down system and a few more things to acquire but we're much better prepared than before. I would be most pleased if we never had to use this equipment, but I'm realistic enough to know it's not “if” but “when”.