How do you like the Minnesota Weather?

California Raised
Being from California, I had never experienced “real” cold. Where I grew up, even getting down to freezing was a rarity, snow was something we visited when we went to the surrounding mountains to play. On the rare occasions that it did snow, everything closed, because no one knew how to drive in really slick conditions and wrecks were very common.
Life in the Sierras
When I moved to the Sierras, I experienced “Sierra Cement”, a type of snow with so much water content, it didn’t even melt in rain, just stubbornly stayed there, with it’s icy slickness, defying sunlight, gravity and snowplows. Temperatures rarely got to zero, but it could snow 6 feet or more overnight. Studded tires and chains provided some help, but drastically lowered speeds, raising travel time.
Minnesota Winters
Here in Central Minnesota, January and February are the coldest months, typically well below freezing, often in the single digits or negative numbers, for weeks on end. My first winter here, I was starting to believe that I would never see anything but snow on the ground, summers warmth seemed a world away. The snow here is never really deep, there are maybe 10″ drifts on our homestead, by Sierra standards pretty wimpy, but it is persistent, January through March.
Minnesota Cold
The cold is brutal, and the prairie winds make it worse. It hurts to breathe, uncovered skin hurts within seconds of stepping outside. The dogs go out to the bathroom, in their coats, looking forlorn and pained after two minutes exposure. Oddly enough, the warmest part of the winter day is often 2-4 in the morning. Roads can be slick, especially early, chains or studded tires are not allowed, due to roadway damages.
Minnesota Summer
The nice thing about being this far north is the daylight lasts a really long time. It is still light here at 10 PM for a good chunk of the year, which is awesome. I had heard about the mosquitos, which can be awful, but no one mentioned Japanese beetles, which look a lot like our cute little California Lady Bugs. Japanese beetles are evil, attack humans and dogs alike, scraping skin a causing horrid irritation. There is an amazing array of insects, starting in the spring, and the birds range from tiny humming birds to eagles, game birds, egrets and herons, all easily seen here in the land of water.
What do I think of the weather here? I love it mostly. I think the temperatures are awesome, much more consistent than California, with higher lows and lower highs, but The Gunsmith thinks it’s hot here in the summer. As for the tornados, thunderstorms and bone chilling cold, I’ll go with what one of the locals told me when we first moved here, “The weather here keeps the bad guys out”.