Observations: Yes, it is cold here. But it doesn’t feel cold. The temperature is difficult to explain. Yes, you have to wear a heavy coat, and yes your hands will get very cold scraping the ice off the car’s windshield. But it doesn’t have the bone chilling cold of the New York winter. I can only assume this is because of the lower humidity here.

Since it is so cold the various heating plants all around the city produce incredibly huge plumes of steam. I don’t mean pillowy clouds of water vapor, I mean towering thunderheads that rise many times higher than the tallest buildings of downtown Minneapolis. Since it’s flat here one can see white plumes all around off in the distance. There is a coal-fired power plant Northwest of the the city, about 50 miles distant. It resembles a cloud-generator off on the horizon. In fact, when the sky is overcast, one gets the idea that the clouds in the sky are actually being created down here.