The Kosmala Blog

Streetview has come to Minneapolis. You can even use it to look at the building where we live now. Just be sure to use 174 for the address (the numbers are always approximate in streetview and it thinks our building is #174).

Update: You can go over the 35W bridge (the one that collapsed) as well!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We got trick-or-treaters last night. It’s the first time since I’ve lived on my own as an adult that such a thing has happened! During college, of course, the kids all knew to avoid the college students’ apartments. Then I lived in a high rise and an apartment complex. No trick-or-treaters there; neighbors don’t know one another. Then to Germany, where Halloween is only just beginning to infiltrate. Then to south Minneapolis, where parents aren’t too keen to let their kids go door-to-door. And now here to the neighborhood of Prospect Park, where people stay for a good long while and neighbors know each other. Okay, well, granted we only got one bunch of trick-or-treaters, but until this year there was no doorbell on the building, so presumably the old-time trick-or-treaters generally skip this place… And one is something.

I was working out on Mike’s farm in Wisconsin yesterday, and it wasn’t until I got into the car for the ride home at about 7:00pm that I turned on the radio and first heard about the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. For those of you on the East Coast, our I-35 here is like your I-95. It’s the major north-south highway that everyone uses to get everywhere. When the highway was built, both Minneapolis and St. Paul wanted I-35 to go through their city — and bring with it the associated business. So I-35 splits south of the Twin Cities, and becomes two highways. One, called I-35W goes through Minneapolis, and the other, I-35E, goes through St. Paul. They then join up again north of the Twin Cities. (Note: That ‘W’ and that ‘E’ are NEVER pronounced “west” or “east”; they’re always just ‘W’ and ‘E’ as if they didn’t stand for anything. On traffic reports, for example, you’d hear, “traffic on I-35W northbound is stopped for an auto accident.”)

Anyway, so I got home and found that, like on September 11, 2001 in New York and D.C., the phone system sucked. Cell phone calls were hopeless, as I’d been hearing on the radio, but land line calls weren’t likely to get through either. We received a couple long-distance calls, but couldn’t call back out.  It occurred to me then that if one had an Internet phone, say one attached to Skype or Vonage or another provider, it would probably be no issue to call out. This struck me as particularly ironic, since one of the major stumbling blocks to adopting Internet telephony initially had been the difficulty of incorporating a 911 system. Yet when a catastrophe struck people needed to contact one another, it was the traditional phone system that failed, and the poo-pooed Internet phone that allowed for communication.

Following the news about the bridge has also been interesting. Much more so now than six years ago, the news media are all imploring the public to send eyewitness accounts, pictures, and videos to them. In the dawning of the citizen-journalist age it’s interesting to note that it’s both quick and easy for the public to send their content directly to a major news outlet. And at the same time, the news media needs that video footage and those pictures to put on their Internet sites, in order to provide instant news. Newspapers, for instance no longer have the luxury of putting together a news story for the next day’s paper; it has to be now, now. Radio needs pictures and video as much as T.V. does.

Now, the day after, Twin Cities residents are all checking up on their friends and colleagues, to make sure everyone’s okay. Friends from away have been sending me emails to that effect. One local friend sent an email last night to a bunch of us, requesting that we all mass-email one another so that we all knew that everyone was all right. That seemed awkward. No one did. This morning I wondered how this physical real-life event was affecting the local online community. As I fence with a number of high-school students, I’ve come to understand that a large part of their social world occurs online now. So I signed up for several social networking sites, the most used by my circle of friends being Facebook. On Facebook, a number of groups have already been created surrounding the collapse of the bridge, with hundreds of members posting prayers and notices there. More interesting, I think, is the use of the Status function.

If you’ve never been on Facebook, let me explain. Like most social network sites, there is the ability to connect with friends in a real-time way, as well as to post messages to be picked up later. The site combines the functions of email, instant messaging, newsgrouping, blogging, and so forth. In Facebook, there’s a function called “Status” that allows you to write something about yourself that will then display to all your friends. It always begins with “[your name] is…” And so, for example, if I look at my Facebook page I’ll see that “Susie is heading north.” and “Sarah is swamped.” and “Madi is feeling Santana’s pain.” At first I thought it was kinda silly, and often it is (”Ella is ughhhhhhahhhhhhhhhahaha.”), but I came to realize that these little tidbits of day-to-day life allow one to stay in touch with distant friends in a closer way than by email. By email, usually the contact is so infrequent (yearly, for instance) that the email is lengthy and covers the major things that have happened, without any detail. So you learn that your friend has moved, has passed the bar, has had an enjoyable trip to Brazil. But you don’t ever hear about the details or the emotion of say, foregoing all other normal life in order to study for the bar. By “Status” messages, today I learn that Ilana got a new laptop, a couple of my local high school-aged friends are visiting colleges, and Jon is “starting to lose that law library pallor.” What’s really neat is that today I can also see at a glance that all my friends and colleagues who are on Facebook were not on the bridge — because they updated their statuses to say so. Now that seems like a much more efficient method of communication than a million emails.

It’s that time of year here in the Upper Midwest: Strawberry Season! Foxtail is rolling in these plump juicy wonders and I was out helping harvest on Wednesday. Yum!

Our new apartment…

… has many unpacked and semi-packed boxes in it
… was built in 1925
… has plaster walls instead of drywall
… has 9-foot ceilings
… is quieter and darker than our old apartment
… has radiators!
… has a gas stove
… has original light fixtures and funky old door handles
… is on a quiet street in a neighborhood with many young families
… is close to both Ben’s work/school and mine
… is on the ground floor
… has creaky wooden floors
… has a galley kitchen with a swinging door
… has a small yard
… has lots of windows - many with their original sash weights
… has only slow DSL at 256 kps
… has a laundry chute!
… has phone jacks everywhere except where we want one
… has two bedrooms
… has an actual dining room (which dwarfs our little eating table)
… has a LOT of counter space

… is now home.

Ben and I went for a lovely bike ride on Friday along the Gateway trail, which starts in St. Paul and heads northeast out towards Wisconsin. We saw lots of wildlife — all sorts of song and water birds, squirrels, rabbits, a deer, and this snapping turtle. She was in the middle of the bike path and was apparently contemplating crossing the major road before her. I tried picking her up and moving her to the nice-looking wetlands she had apparently just left. She didn’t want any of that, thrashing and trying to bite. I had to put her down to keep from dropping her, and so we left her here, at the edge of the bike path. When we biked the return leg of our trip, she was nowhere to be seen (and there was no mushed turtle in the road either).

This past weekend Ben and I drove down to St. Louis, Missouri, for the wedding of our friends Tim and Erin. That’s what people do out here in the Midwest, you know, they just “drive down to Missouri” or “out to Colorado” or wherever, without really a thought about it. The distance between Minneapolis and St. Louis is about 560 miles - or a little longer than the distance from Portland, Maine, to Washington D.C. The drive itself takes from 9 to 10 hours with a few short breaks and little traffic.

So on Friday we hopped on the road and started our merry way down to Missouri. Traffic was pretty light and the speed limit was high, when there weren’t signs for construction. (Very little actual construction was apparent, but there were numerous construction zones. There was even one “school zone” which dropped the speed from 65 down to 55.) We listened to NPR, which had its various assortments of shows. And then, close to five hours into our trip, as we were driving through the cornfields of Iowa, Ben had a realization.

What he realized is that we had left our dress clothes hanging up by the front door, placed there so as to, well, not forget them. We had with us our suitcase with our non-dress clothes and our toiletries and even our dress shoes, but we were planning on keeping the suit and dress hanging in the car, so they wouldn’t wrinkle much. Except. Except they were doing an excellent job of not wrinkling in Minneapolis, almost five hours back.

Hmm. Well, we could A: go back and get them. That would add another 9+ hours to our already ~19 hours on the road for the weekend; plus we would have to sleep short. Bonus: dinner at home. Option B was to keep going and buy new clothes. We pondered briefly Idea C: get a friend to break into our apartment and FedEx us our clothes; and Idea D: have a friend who we knew was driving down to Iowa City that evening break into our apartment and bring the clothes with him to Iowa City, delaying the second half of our southbound journey to the following day. Since both C and D involved getting someone into our locked apartment, and A was depressing, we scrapped them and went with Option B. The wedding wasn’t until 4:00 PM on Saturday, and while we had planned to have a relaxing half-day hanging out at a park (we, um, forgot the frisbee, too), we decided we’d go shopping instead.

As it turned out, our hotel (one of the Drury chain, and very pleasant) was less than fifteen minutes from both the best consignment store in Missouri, Women’s Closet Exchange, and a comprehensive mall. (Ah technology: having our laptops in a hotel with free wireless made finding them quite easy.) So Saturday morning we got up early, ate, and then - waited, as neither place opened until 10:00. First up was the consignment store to find me, well, something to wear. It was smaller than I imagined, but the saleswoman was super friendly. We didn’t find much in the way of dresses, but our very-attentive saleswoman suggested skirt and blouse combos. There we had more success, and I eventually left with a rather nice top and skirt - all for under $20!

Ben was up next and we headed to the Men’s Wearhouse at the mall to get him a suit. We decided that he’d tuck in and just get a nice outfit, since he had been considering getting a new suit anyway. The salesman there was also quite attentive and got the trousers hemmed and the new shirt steamed ahead of other waiting orders for us.

We had just enough time to go back to the hotel, shower, dress, and head out to the wedding. Halfway there we realized we had forgotten the camera in the hotel room. (Theme of the weekend?) But we didn’t have time to go back. Other folks had cameras, though, and thanks to Tim and Erin’s friend Lori, there’s a picture of us in our duds (at least the tops):

The wedding itself was lovely. I shared an apartment with Tim in D.C. when I lived there. He started dating Erin shortly after I met him, so I’ve known her for a quite a while as well. They had wonderful weather, a lovely locale, and the ceremony suited them excellently. (She’s pretty religious, he’s not, and the service was a beautiful compromise.) The cameraman was a bit zealous, but they’ll have some great shots. I got a chance to chat with my other D.C. apartment-mate, Mike, who was in the wedding party, and is hoping to move out to San Francisco soon. We also became reacquainted with Lori and Roz, the only other people I knew there, and met some other friends of Tim and Erin’s. Oh, and I was randomly complimented on my ($14) skirt by someone I didn’t know(!)

Erin, Tim, and Lori:

Several weeks ago - over a month, really - I first saw the Albino Squirrel. I was working at home and there I have a nice view out the front, where I can keep an eye on the goings-on of the neighborhood. Well, all of a sudden this flash of white darted out into the street and I thought, “woah, I haven’t seen a white cat around here before.” But then I looked more closely and realized it was a squirrel. When I told Ben, he teased me, “yeah, sure. Of course you saw a white squirrel. They’re just everywhere.” Just like the abominable snowman. A couple days later, when I was again home alone, I saw the Squirrel a second time. When Ben teased me again, I named the squirrel Mr. Snuffleupagus. I would have to get a picture…

Of course, the next couple times I saw the Squirrel I was outside and sans camera. And somehow, despite riding his bike to and from school every day, the Squirrel never presented itself to Ben. Finally, last week, I saw the Squirrel from my window again, grabbed the camera and ran outside. The Squirrel was by the neighbor’s house, clambering in the plants and the bushes, before rushing off into the next yard. My best effort at a photograph was a shot of the side of the house, with a blurry half-hidden squirrel not quite visible. “There! There it is!” I proclaimed to Ben, showing him the picture. He looked at me skeptically. “That could be a squirrel…” he conceded. “Or a rock, or a plant, or litter.” I sighed. I was gaining compassion for those who have tried to photograph Yeti’s or UFO’s or Loch Ness Monsters. “The reason those are so hard to photograph,” Ben explained patiently, “is because they don’t exist.” Argh! I had to prove that the Albino Squirrel’s existence.

It wasn’t until this weekend when I went running and there in a neighbor’s yard, again, was the Squirrel. I ran back the half-block and grabbed the camera - and Ben, for this time he was home. Success on both fronts: Ben finally saw the Albino Squirrel and I got a couple good photos of it.