Minnesotans...uff da!

Minnesotans are weird.

I am a Minnesotan. And I have been for most of my life, since my Dad retired from the military and we stopped moving every few years. I’m talking 20 years of Minnesotan, raised by 2 Minnesota-born parents. Oh and we visited my grandparents for about a month every summer in, where else? Minnesota.

But let’s face it; we Minnesotans are a different breed.

Do they show commercials featuring things like corn-borers or rootworms in other areas of the country? (Adjacent states excepted, of course.)

Would you be amused to know that we actually have a segment on our local news that displays the following words on our television screens: Live Cattle, Feeder Cattle, Lean Hogs, BFP Dairy Futures, Cash Corn and Beans. And there are people that are interested to know this information.

I was about to say that there are no corn fields in my yard, but alas, there is one across the street. We take our children out into the road to watch our neighboring farmer harvest his crop in the fall. We can hear the combine running late into the night. And I just realized that I have admitted to you all that I know what some farm equipment is called.

We are oddly proud that we have an abundance of mosquitoes, and actually have t-shirts adorned with pictures of mosquitoes.

We say things like “I’m going to the store, do you want to go with?” and this is considered a complete sentence. With what? Who?

We eat things called hotdishes.

My Mom regularly “warshes” her clothes, and sits on a Davenport. (This is a couch, or sofa, to me.)

“Uff-da!”

“You betcha!”

At one of my former jobs, my then-boss, a Cajun transplant by way of California, called me into her office and closed the door. She had just returned from a Toastmasters meeting and was bewildered by something she heard there. “Heather, they told me to help myself to a bar! I got the feeling that they didn't mean a place with alcohol…WTF is a bar?”

We wave to people that we don’t know. Jeff, over at View From the Cloud, did a nice little tutorial about motorcycle-wave etiquette. I think some of it translates to the friendly Minnesotan "howdy" wave from a car, with the exception that (if we're in our neighborhood or even in the neighborhood of a friend, relative or acquaintance) we just wave at everyone. The degree of the wave can still vary, as Jeff explains.

We think nothing of asking a fellow shopper to get something for us off the top shelf, or even ask for a coupon. (Even after you’ve butted in line in front of them at the gas station…gerrrr.)

No wonder they make movies like Fargo and Drop Dead Gorgeous about Minnesotans.