Amanda the Great by Amanda El-Dweek for December 14, 2023

guess people who live under 122F will appreciate N. Dakota

I can take 40 days and 40 nights of rain before I’d live anywhere on the prairies, or anywhere else where it stays below freezing more than a couple of days. Not my son, though- he moved to Yellowknife.

North Dakota looks really pretty, I say as I sit in 35°C temperatures.

We were there three years . .

weather alert…

I had something similar happen to me earlier this year when I was visiting Maine. The native Mainers I talked with all told me horrible things about the winters there. “Sometimes it snows before Thanksgiving, and we won’t see the ground again until March!” The only person who said she enjoyed the winters, and the snow, was a shopkeeper who came from Alabama.

You got her saying it in your strip – good enough for me!

When we lived in California, I used to sit in the sun on a nice winter day and wonder why people would live where it snowed and was freezing. For family reasons, I am now in North Idaho which is fantastic most of the year. Most winters can be brutal, but this winter we have been above freezing every day ~ so far. Still, when all the houses in the neighborhood have frost on them, ours is the only one that doesn’t ~ if that tells you anything.

There’s a reason I have lived my entire adult life south of the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, my current home in Tennessee is the farthest north I’ve lived since I was a small child.

I actually really like the changing of the seasons. Then January hits…

I’m from Nebraska. Would love to move back there or to the Dakotas. Unfortunately there aren’t many jobs for retired Army Aviators there.

Witness protection.

Where’s she from? Alaska, where winter is one long night?

Great latitude and attitude.

My wife’s mother grew up in Sou Dakoda. During WWII her entire family moved to California.

I’m a lizard, so I always say I like my native hot dry west Texas weather but last summer was pretty brutal.

My cousin is a California girl and moved to northern Saskatchewan for work and loves the winters. Her wife, who has never been south of Vancouver except for a few trips to Seattle, wants to spend just a week or two in some place where she does not have to layer up in December. And it looks like that might happen next year. She will be amazed.