What a beautiful day to drop into the Minnesota State Fair. I love watching the carpenters and painters getting the booths ready. Today it was a gaggle of electricians wiring up the building across from the poultry barn. The horse barn is clean and quiet -- no horses have arrived and the constant buzzing of fans has not yet started for the fair. The grass is being watered and is still green -- not littered yet with the droppings of 100,000 people that attend the fair each year. (Or each day some have reported!) Droppings of another kind scatter just down the block from the horse barn. (see picture) These are fun times for midwestern institutions like The Fair. Times of recession seem to bring out people to attend public gatherings like the fair. Perhaps it's for the family experience -- or "togetherness" time -- that an event like walking the fair is. The Fair seems to be part of my family from childhood -- when mother took my sister Irene and I to "The Great Minnesota Get Together." The Fair seems to shape my life; in my teenage years the only time that a home in our neighborhood in New Brighton was burglarized was during the 12-days of the fair. (Burglarized by an out of towner. We all know that a Minnesotan wouldn't dare steal from another Minnesotan; lest his act be spoken of each year at The Fair.) My wife and I have enjoyed visiting the fair, volunteering for the "Donuts for Democrats" mini donut booth a few years back. And friends of mine and I have enjoyed listening to the walkie-talkie FRS radios that everyone carries around during the fair, sometimes interjecting a "hey! buy me some mini donuts too!" into conversations. Megan and I have lived near the fair for the past 8 years. Four years in South St. Anthony Park (yes, near the St. Anthony Park Community Garden) and now in a home just east of the Fairgrounds near Como Park. Megan walks or bikes each day to and from the University of MInnesota through the fairgrounds year round, and I have worked jobs during the summer wiring, setting up sound systems and the like for the Back to The 1950's car shows that go on during the summertime. It seems, then, that my fate of working at The Fair would be sealed: Today I interviewed for a fair-time job at the Star Tribune booth. ...And since this is bring written before the interview, I have no results of what has come of it. Perhaps more blogging later! -matt More…

As the sun sets over Como Park here in St. Paul, the national and local boys have decided that there is a slight chance of severe weather -- nothing tornadic -- just hail, winds, and heavy (mabie flash flooding type) rains. Judging that it "feels" more humid then it was this afternoon outside right now (and it was a sweatfest this afternoon here in St. Paul) the conditions are "ripe" for severe weather. To get showers to pop over the Twin Cities, however, will be more a function of the temperature keeping up after the sun sets tonight. The problem with nighttime thunderstorms is that often after sunset the temperature drops too much for us urbanites to get the energy needed for more the a drenching rain. If I lived in southern Minnesota, like Fairmont or along I-90, tonight might be a nail-biter. The Twin Cities will likely get some rain -- perhaps drenching -- but that's it. The thunderous stuff is likely popping west of the Twin Cities and in southern Minnesota tonight. Exciting night for storms, for the state, however. Just the feeling of the "thick as soup" weather here in Como Park is enough to get my eyes looking out the window and my air-conditioning on full-blast. -matt More…

My wife Megan was awoken this morning in the pre- 9:00am hours of Friday morning to the usually quiet weather radio alarm. Ramsey County was under a severe thunderstorm warning -- but we had nothing but a rain-free front yard. As Megan contemplated biking into work today, I readied the car for a trip to the University of Minnesota East Bank campus. Clearly the east side of St. Paul had roaring claps of thunder. When folks' say that severe storms "sounded like a freight train" they are not kidding. Today's storm to our east of St. Paul's Como Park sounded more like a 200-car train slowly coming to a stop. The "linkage" or "claps of thunder" were nearly non-stop for 20 minutes. More…

Thursday's snowfall was a welcome sight -- but not for Twin Cities area commuters. The thunder-snow, rain/snow mix fell heavily here in the Snelling and University Ave. St. Paul picture and made for miserable travel on area roads. The snow was light and fluffy and easy to shovel in St. Paul (como park). It also created a nice icy chunk on my wiper blades that lifted the blade 3 inches off my windshield, leaving this nice icy chunk of stuff to look through on my Toyota Prius windshield. (See photo) More…

Drive to Bloomington from St. Paul was met with some flurries on and off while driving. Would be much prettier if less road salt was sprinkled on I-394 and Hwy 100. The low-contrast, slow-falling flakes were enjoyable once on the car's windshield; hard to detect while dodging traffic against the low-contrast backdrop of white-salt-covered roadways. It's a pity that MNDOT and others don't get out the street sweepers and clean the roadways every day that we get near 32. ... Today I am hanging out at the Sheraton Hotel in Bloomington. Amazingly enough, google maps did not have the location for the hotel when you badly misspell it (and no auto correction). My phonetic Minnesota upbringing leads me to believe you should spell the famous hotel name like it sounds; "She - Ra - Den" kind of like a badger "den" for the TV character "shera". Perhaps I need to learn to spell "Sheraton" and not the Sheriden less then "eyes (I)" and "dees (d)". My spelling seems to have more class; but is so far off that google cannot auto-correct it. Drive to bloomington from St. Paul was met with some flurries on and off while driving. Would be much prettier if less road salt was sprinkled on I-394 and Hwy 100. The low-contrast, slow-falling flakes were enjoyable once on the car's windshield; hard to detect while dodging traffic against the low-contrast backdrop of white-salt-covered roadways. It's a pity that MNDOT and others don't get out the street sweepers and clean the roadways every day that we get near 32. The meeting I am lingering around is planning the upcoming Sci-Fi convention in July 2009 called "Convergence Con." It's basically a four-day party where a 21-story hotel gets taken over by Sci-Fi geeks that party and toss twelve-sided die. See: http://www.convergence-con.org/ -matt More…

Wow. What a cold winter this year. My furnace has not stopped since October. How about this for a first weather-related blog entry? More…