I Remember Humidity

Do you know the best place to visit in the dead of winter? The Como Park Conservatory. Or your local equivalent — I can personally recommend Kew Gardens and the Palmengarten in Frankfurt, as well.

I mean, could there possibly be anything further from winter than that? No, is the answer. I’m seriously thinking about visiting once a week from now until Spring. At the very least, it’ll save me some money on moisturizer — you don’t know the meaning of dry skin until you’ve spent a winter in Minnesota.

The Como Conservatory has really expanded over the past few years, adding a fern room (blech, fiddleheads) and a tropical building that has some nice fishes and leaf-cutter ants (both of which were hard to photograph behind grubby plexiglass) and little yellow birds and a few opportunistic mice. Oh, and a sloth. I’d much rather go to a botanical garden that happens to have to animals around the place than a proper zoo — less depressing.

After spending a long time at the conservatory (it’s hard to feel motivated to leave 78F-and-humid when it’s windy and below freezing outside), Rob and I relaxed at Coffee News, due to its relative proximity and its superior selection of cakes.
We stopped by Cheapo before heading back to Minneapolis, and I bought three — three! — Elvis Costello albums. Two of them I ‘had’ to get, since I’m reading a biography of Mr Costello’s career at the moment, and it’s so unsatisfying to read about the genesis of an album when you don’t know the songs. I already had his first four, so I picked up ‘Trust’ and ‘Almost Blue’ so that I can keep reading the book. I also bought ‘North’, which is much more recent, and full of croon-y ballads. I’d nearly bought it a while ago, but convinced myself that I was more of an Elvis-Costello-and-the-Attractions kind of girl. But, of course, it was his cover of ‘She’ from the Notting Hill soundtrack that made me fall in love with his voice ten years ago. So I shouldn’t be surprised that ‘North’ makes me swoon.
So, in summary, I might start a winter support group that consists of listening to Elvis Costello while wandering around climate-controlled greenhouses. On sunny days.