Quality with a capital 'Q', Part I.

Here's some pics of Minneapolis, an interestin company building and, uh, that's it really. I can also say without a doubt, the drive from CHI to MPL is about 7 hours of cheesy Wisconsin goodness.

Minny got a really light coat of snow during the trip. It didn't amount to much on the roads, but it made the trees look nice.

This building is LEED certified (i.e. very enviro-friendly) and has a 40 megawatt solar panel array on the roof. I've heard it's the largest such array in the Upper Midwest. Powerful stuff. (I could have said "shocking" instead?)

The building is mostly warehouse, but since they are encroaching on forest preserve, they keep building up rather than out. Inside one wing of the building, special forklifts run on an almost prefectly level concrete floor and bring the driver up to heights of 35ft to pick products off the really really tall stacks of shelving. The guys wear what is basically a climbers harness while on the forklift. Falling would be bad.

It's kind of cool to have paved running and riding trails on one end of your company's parking lot... esp if you're a bike company.