A Trip Back in Time

I was looking back at pictures from Minnesota today and saw all these flowers. I had all kinds of flowers planted and loved the bright pops of color in the yard.

I haven't planted any flowers since moving to Georgia. Part of me doesn't want the extra work because I'm stretched too thin as it is and am struggling to find enough hours in my day. But then I see these pictures and I miss them. I'll have to mull.

Picture to left is at my mom and dad's house in 2009.

This picture to the right is a tree lily that I had in my backyard. this is also 2009.

This picture was taken in 2007. It's my Minnesota house with flowers on the front porch. This is the only year I did annuals because they're more work than perennials.

Georgia Winter

For those of you who don't know, I was born in Minnesota and spent most of my life there. I've only lived in Atlanta for six years--that's when my job was relocated down there. I was thinking about this recently and doing a little mental compare/contrast with Minnesota.

In January Atlanta was caught up in some cold snaps. The temperatures were in the 40s for highs.

Me in MN: 40s! OMG, it's so warm! I wish it would stay this way all winter.
Me in GA: OMG, it's so cold! It needs to warm up. I can't take this arctic air!

Me in MN: It's the end of October and temps are in the 30s. I don't care if you guys make fun of me for wearing my winter jacket, winter hat, and mittens. I'm cold.
Me in GA: I'm not putting on my damn winter jacket. I hate that thing. It's in the 20s (low temps), but I just have to run from the car to the building.

Me in MN: Two inches of snow? Damn it, that's a freaking nuisance.
Me in GA: Two inches of snow? OMG, I better bring my laptop home so I can work from the house and I have to get to the grocery store now!

In my defense, the drivers in Atlanta can't handle driving in the rain. Snow brings out extra insanity and I don't want to be on the road with them. The working from home and groceries are so I don't have to leave my house until the insanity has passed.

Even my dad, who's only lived down here two years after living in Minnesota for most of his adult life, has changed. Now, if it's in the 20s or 30s at night, he won't go to his lodge meetings. He tells me it's too cold to go out. This makes me chuckle because it wasn't too cold for him when he lived in Minneapolis. :-) I'll still go out in the cold, but I'm not happy about it. (I almost put "cold" in quotes because seriously, 30s in Minnesota in January is called the January Thaw.)

I thought I'd share my change in winter thoughts because it struck me as ironic. And it's 29 degrees as I'm writing this--my dad just said, "I'm glad we don't have to go out today."

Super Duper Target

***I received no compensation of any kind from anyone for this post.***

More thoughts from my Minnesota trip.

Growing up--and living most of my life--in Minnesota, I took a few things for granted. Like Target. From where I lived, I had three Target stores nearby. I could go to any of the three of them without having to drive very far. One of these three is not just a Super Target, but like a Super Duper Colossal Target. :-) The kind with a nearly full grocery store in addition to an enormous rest of the store.

It was like walking into heaven. (FYI, I love Target!)

There's only one Target near me in Georgia and it's not that close. It also doesn't have the space or the amount of merchandise that I saw in the Minnesota Target.

At the Minnesota store, I saw these awesome welcome mats. The welcome mat I have now (also purchased at MN Target when I moved into my MN house) is faded and starting to wear. I thought about replacing it with one of the cute mats I spotted on this trip, but my dad had misled me about the amount of stuff we had to haul down from MN to GA, and I knew the car was going to be tight. I decided I'd check out my GA Target for the mats.

I should have bought the welcome mat I liked while I was in Minnesota. They did not have them at my local store. It was also sad to walk into my local store and see how much smaller it was than my old Minnesota favorite.

There are so many things I miss about Minnesota, but one of the big ones is having my choice of awesome Target stores close at hand.

PS: Ditto for Caribou Coffee. OMG, it was a dream to have so many Caribou stores close to me wherever I was in the Twin Cities! I don't even have a Caribou anywhere near me in Georgia and I have to order my coffee online. Sadness.

***I received no compensation of any kind from anyone for this post.***

A Job Not Completed

This is a Minnesota trip post.

After two days of driving, my dad and arrived at the house. We opened the garage door and it wasn't empty. The garage--the entire house--was supposed to be nearly empty. My dad had paid the guy who held the estate sale in December to empty it out and he'd paid him a lot of money for this job to be completed.

There was also stuff in the basement he hadn't gotten rid of either--big things like a console television and a console record player that was probably from the 1950s or 1960s and some cabinets and more stuff. Really, dude? What a way to screw over an elderly person who trusted you.

Before we'd left Georgia, my dad had said there was almost nothing in the house and that there was even less we needed to bring back to my house. He left me with the impression that there was nothing left to do and I'd brought a lot of things along to keep me occupied. The list included two crochet projects, two crochet video classes I'd loaded onto my iPad, four movies I'd put on my iPad, and the computer I use to write with away from home. I had such plans!

Everything went out the window when we saw the house hadn't been emptied out the way it was supposed to me. The estate sale guy, BTW, had not answered my dad's phone calls since at least January, possibly earlier than that, so there was no way to get him to finish the job he'd been paid to do.

The good news was that when we met with the Realtor the next day who'd be listing the house, she said she had the name of someone who could get rid of the rest of the stuff after we left, including the mattresses we'd be using while we were there. My dad had a mattress on a bed frame, but the mattress in my room was on the floor. Sigh. But the real estate lady saved us so much hassle and that was a big deal. She also arranged for someone to come clean the house after we left.

Score two for real estate lady, and minus one for estate sale guy.

Song of the South

Saturday my dad and I went grocery shopping for Thanksgiving. He and my mom wanted a pumpkin pie (I don't like it) and Publix had one from their bakery on sale, so they decided that was the pie. My dad had to go make a return, so I began the shopping.

Right at the front of the store was a selection of sale pies. I looked at them, saw the ones that looked like pumpkin, and took the best looking one.

Later, while we were in the freezer section, my dad bought a second pumpkin pie.

After an hour of torture (I hate grocery shopping), we checked out and put everything in the car. My dad starts studying the receipt. Suddenly he asks, "Did we buy a sweet potato pie?"

I'm like, "No, I grabbed a pumpkin." And then I started thinking about it. What does a sweet potato pie even look like? I realized I had no clue. "Maybe," I said after a few moments, "I messed up and grabbed the wrong pie. We'll have to check."

Sure enough as we unload the bags, I see sweet potato pie.

As I looked at the pie, I realized what had happened. We don't eat sweet potato pie in Minnesota. Maybe some people do, but it's not in large enough numbers for grocery stores to sell them. So in Publix (in Georgia), I looked down, saw a pie that looked like pumpkin and just put it in the cart. It never occurred to me that it could be anything except pumpkin.

My parents decided they'd try it. The verdict? It tastes like pumpkin pie. :-)

Farewell Old Friend

On July 12th, I said goodbye to my home in Minnesota. That's the day I closed and handed the keys and garage remotes over to the new owners.

I didn't cry at the closing, although I thought I would. I did cry earlier, though, when I was taking my last pictures and making a farewell video. At first, I was dry-eyed through this as well, but at some point, I guess it finally dawned on me that it was the last time the house was mine.

It was really odd to see the house empty again. I'd forgotten how it felt and looked without my stuff everywhere. I'd been in the process of depersonalizing the house--painting over my bright, fun colors with neutrals, replacing my raspberry curtains with burgundy and beige, etc. But even with the fun gone, it still felt mostly like my house as long as my things were there.

With everything gone, well, it really did feel like someone else's home.

Talking Minnesotan Part 2

There are some distinct Minnesota ways of speaking that have nothing to do with an accent. You can check out my previous post for my rant about Fargo and the stereotype that everyone in Minnesota talks like that.

Do you want to go with? That is a full sentence in Minnesota. You can fill in whatever word you like at the end--me, us, him, her, them, etc. In my search of the internet, I saw this attributed to the German speakers who came to the state because it matches their sentence structure.

For me, I don't understand what the big deal is. If you're having a conversation with someone about how you plan to go to the Mega Mall (that's what we call the Mall of America near the airport) this weekend and say, Do you want to go with, that you pretty much can assume the me at the end. Why add an unnecessary word?

Minnesotans also will say, will you borrow me a pencil. Meaning lend, not borrow. That was attributed to Scandinavian speakers and their language. IIRC, it was that lend and borrow were the same word in that language or something like that. Sorry, I viewed many websites about the topic and can't remember exactly. I slip into this one from time to time, but I had a high school teacher who pointed this out to my class and explained why it was wrong, so I've mostly broken myself of this speech habit.

Minnesota Nice plays a role in how we talk. We don't like to offend anyone by making too strong a statement so we say things like that's quite the deal or it could be worse because it always could be worse. This is actually one of the things about living in Atlanta that scrapes against me--how in-your-face people are about things like politics and religion. That's not something that happens much in Minnesota and I'm always taken aback when I hear it here.

The Minnesota hotdish thing was bigger in the past than it is now, IMO. Healthy eating doesn't include hotdishes loaded with cream of mushroom soup and tater tots. I do believe these are still staples, though, at church dinners and funerals. I'm going by conversations I've heard at work from people who actually cook. Me? I'm a disaster in the kitchen and don't have the patience to make a hotdish. :-)

In Minnesota, the weather is a legitimate topic of conversation and can easily last twenty minutes. I've met people from states where they have no real weather to speak of and they are astounded by this. I attribute this to a few things--first, we do have lots of interesting weather in MN and it can change rapidly. Second, it is farm country (outside The Cities) and farmers have an interest in what the weather is doing. Third, it's an easy way to make small talk with someone. No matter who you meet, if they're from MN, you have the weather in common.

I noticed a few typos in here. I corrected the ones I found and please forgive the others. I was passionate as I wrote these last two posts. :-)

Talking Minnesotan

Over the weekend, I did a little searching for how Minnesotans talk. Unfortunately, a lot of what I came up with involved an out-state accent ala Fargo. Um, no. Not in the Twin Cities.

Or I guess I should say you won't hear that accent from people who grew up in the Twin Cities. (FYI, we always refer to them as The Cities.) People who grew up out state might have that accent to some degree, but they tend to lose some of it the longer they live in The Cities. Notice there are only two parts of Minnesota--Out State and the Cities. :-)

One of the blogs I stumbled across was by some woman who'd moved from California to Virginia to Minnesota and her post irritated the crap out of me. First of all, no one I've ever talked to pronounces bag like beg. Ever, chick. Not ever. Second, I've never heard anyone call a snack, lunch. FFS. Lunch is the noon meal, dinner is the evening meal.

Of course, some of the terminology changes in farm country. They call lunch Dinner and Dinner, Supper. But in all my years in MN, not once, not even when I attended college in Morris, MN, have I heard anyone--city or out state--refer to a snack as lunch.

This same blogger bitched about use of the word pop. This is another FFS. Half the country says soda, the other half says pop and some say tonic or Coke. If you want to actually see some statistics on it, there's an entire website devoted to it.

Anyway, my irritation with said blogger is what's inspired this post. I'm so sick of seeing people perpetuating the stereotype that we all sound like the movie Fargo. BTW, according to what I learned in my college linguistics class, the "standard" dialect used by newscasters, movies, radio, etc as the US accent? That's the Northern Dialect. Where does Minnesota fall? Into the Northern Dialect.

But yes, there are some moments where we do sound "Minnesotan." Sometimes that long O just rolls out unexpectedly. Sometimes I do it on purpose. Keep in mind that sometimes I also roll out the Chicago accent on some words unexpectedly.

Next blog post I'll talk about some of the things that are Minnesotan.

The Journey Home

In case anyone is wondering why I've been so quiet online lately, it's because I was up in Minnesota, working to get my house ready to sell, and there wasn't time to spare. I'll have a bunch of blog posts about that later.

Driving up from Atlanta was interesting. Like the driver in Illinois who tailgated me even though there was no one in the left-hand lane and she could have easily passed me. I mean this woman was right on my bumper. It irritated the hell out of me and I'm thinking to myself, when did they start driving like this in Illinois? This is what I'd expect in Atlanta, not here. 

It took the chick a while to figure out I wasn't going any faster no matter how close she got to my car and finally, she does go around me. And guess what I saw as she went past? Georgia license plates. Fulton county, no less. For those of you unfamiliar, Atlanta is in Fulton county.

The other thing that struck me as interesting was reaching Minnesota. As soon as we went past the airport and was in my old stomping grounds, I moved into the left-hand lane. I haven't driven in the left lane since I moved in January because it's a flipping NASCAR race on the freeways in Atlanta and even going 15 mph over the speed limit in the right lane will get you tailgated.

Do you have any idea how awesome it felt to be able to drive in the left lane again? I always drove in the fast lane in MN because there I'm one of the speedier drivers. It was freeing and it was so much less stressful to drive there than in Atlanta. Yes, we still have the idiot factor, but at least the idiots are going slower and I don't fear for my life.

The other thing that stood out to me on getting home was the lack of bugs. I don't mean that as in the condo in Atlanta was inundated with them. It really wasn't despite how it felt. It was just that the bugs were bigger (palmetto bugs, shudder) or they were ickier (centipedes, anyone?).

I climbed into bed that first night at home and realized I hadn't checked the bed for spiders or other bugs. Then I realized that I didn't have to do that there. I do a bug check every night in Atlanta—just in case. I've never found anything—yet—but did I mention the bugs were bigger and ickier down here? I'd rather err on the side of caution than to get into bed with bugzilla.