An Old-Time Small Town Meal. And Some Snow.

Today one of my sales reps, Jay, and I had a meeting in the small town of Faribault, MN.  This was with a customer who uses our product within an asset managment tool (Maximo), so there were people in our meeting wearing hard hats, which is weird in a enterprise software business meeting.  I've actually seen it a few times before in this same situation with that particular product, but it still strikes me as odd every time.  After the meeting we were both hungry and wanted to get lunch.  We talked about it and realized we both wanted to find a local diner instead of eating at some chain restaurant.  Someone recommended Anna Dee's Cafe to us, and it was just what we wanted.  It featured good food, lots of local patrons, a middle-aged waitress who took our order on one of those old-time order forms (I thought for sure she'd call us "Hon" or "Sug"), and fake-wood booths with orange seats.  It was great.  Seriously.  One weird thing to me was a series of menu items called commercials.  For example, I ordered a "beef commercial".  Jay was surprised I didn't know what that was.  To me, a "beef commercial" indicates something else.  Further discussion and research indicates this is primarily a Minnesota term for an open-faced sandwich smothered in gravy. Anyway, it was good, and we were really happy with our restaurant selection. 

Weather-wise, all the snow that I thought Minneapolis was going to get apparently hit further south.  Faribault was only 45 minutes south, and it had several inches of snow, and they said towns even further south got a foot of snow.  I had an early afternoon flight back to KC, and when I landed, we were getting snow!  Large flakes were falling, and there was already accumulation on the ground.  We are in May!  May!  This has been the weirdest, most rollercoastery weather winter and year ever.  Here's a picture of me getting pelted by snowflakes after I landed in KC.