My Car as seen on Google Street View

Fender Bender

Taken at 9th and Marquette

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Double O Seven

2007 in review:

January - I packed all of my possessions, got a new apartment thanks to Craigslist, and moved in the last week of January (movers rock). I also got Microsoft certified in Excel 2003.

February - I unpacked most of my stuff and started making dinner at my house once a week, starting with chicken lettuce wraps. I also got to go to a Minnesota Wild Game.

March - I started the month by booking my airfare to Europe in May and applying for my passport. The rest of the month spent I booking hotels and tours.

April - My grandparents moved out of their house and held an auction to get rid of stuff.

May - Europe!! But first, I had to beg and plead for my passport.

June - I turned 30.

July - I reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and the Half-Blood Prince and then read the Deathly Hallows. My niece and I hit Borders at midnight for the Deathly Hallows release party. I saw Order of the Phoenix at midnight the day it came out, and 3 more times in the theater.

August - It started with the bridge collapse. It ended with the first meeting of my Writing 2 class.

September - I met a guy online, started dating him and made him my boyfriend, all in 30 short, rainy days. We went to the Renaissance Festival on the 29th.

October - I visited Duluth with the new boyfriend and I transformed myself into Medusa for Halloween. My brother-in-law and I took my sister to see Jim Gaffigan at the Orpheum for her birthday.

November - I finally got to see MIA in concert at First Ave.

December - I stopped biting my nails. I used the method of wearing a rubber band on my wrist. It served as a reminder and on the few times I did bite, I snapped the rubber band. Lastly, I posted to my blog on 27 of the 31 days in December, which was one of my 101 things to do.

Apartment Therapy

I currently live in a 2 bedroom with my niece and I pay $650 per month, with no parking included.

Going backwards:
My last apartment was a studio where I paid $590 per month and had a parking spot.
Before that, it was 2 different one bedrooms for like $660 with free parking.
My sister and I shared a 2 bedroom for around $850 with free parking.
I had a one bedroom with no parking, a shared 2 bedroom for around $690 and my first apartment was a studio for $315 (!) with no parking.


These have all been in Minneapolis, St. Louis Park or Hopkins and most included some sort of "pet rent".

Celebrities I have seen in person

At Book Signings or Staged events:
Sean Astin (see below)
Brett Butler
Patricia Cornwell
Malcolm Gladwell
Danny Glover
Kevin Smith - St Cloud State, February 17th, 2006, the man talked for nearly 5 hours with no break!
Margaret Thatcher

On the Street:
Kevin MacDonald
John Kerry
Numerous Minnesotan politics, sports and news people at the Fair

In Concert:
Liz Phair
Sheryl Crow
Dido
Prince
Chumbawumba
Everclear
Smashing Pumpkins
New Kids on The Block

Sean Astin Book Signing November 23, 2004 Mall of America

My niece and I stood there, dumbfounded, elbowing each other and squealing a little bit. Were our eyes deceiving us? Could it possibly be true that, in a few weeks, Sean Astin, Samwise Gamgee himself, was going to be signing his book mere feet from where we were standing? I checked my mental calendar and found that I already had that whole week off of work, since it was Thanksgiving, and I figured I could miss the first part of my evening class.

I picked her up early from school, since the signing started at 5:00 pm, but we knew the line would be huge. We got there about 2:15 and went to eat, finally getting to the rotunda at about 3pm. There were about 45 people in front of us, but we sat down, paged through the book and drooled over the pictures of him and the other cast members. People in front of us in line had laptops and were watching various parts of the Lord of the Rings movies. Some of them also had on t-shirts from the Minnesota Tolkien Society that announced a screening of all 3 extended edition DVDs at a church in Maple Grove on New Year's Eve. We agreed to go and invited others, but nobody else was up to it.

Back in line, as the time neared my niece gasps and says she saw him behind the curtain. She straining to get a look at where he went when the emcee woman comes up on stage and announces him. He comes out and pumps up the crowd a bit by naming a few of his movies and asking those who liked them to clap. Then he takes questions from the audience and shows off the t-shirt from the Tolkien Society that he was wearing.

Then it was time for the line to run through. There were people there who would take your picture so I handed him my digital camera and asked him to try to get my niece, and he actually got a nice shot of both her and I smiling like goons at him. I overheard him say. "Oh, you're sweet," to my niece and I didn't have much to say aside from thanking him. I was one of those moments that is over before you know it, and that you have to keep replaying in your head so that you know it was real. We went up to some of the higher floors to watch the line for a while and get some aerial photos of the whole thing.

Local Blog Shoutout

Local blogs

• Aaron was the only local friend of mine who had a blog that was regularly updated and that the average person could access.* But then myspace came along and more of them started and Aaron switched over.
  
• Jodi is almost always funny, except when she's not.
• It makes me sad that Tequila Mockingbird only posted twice last year.
• One of these days, I will actually go to one of Scooter's Game days.
• MNSpeak has a local blog aggregator and City Pages has local directory.

*Are you a local friend of mine who has a blog that I don't know about? Why are you reading mine while keeping yours a big secret, huh?

Read this

This month's Rake Magazine has one of the best short stories I've read in a long time, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. It's by Cory Doctorow of boingboing fame and I don't know if it would appeal to a nongeek or not, but I couldn't put it down.

Carpooler

I carpool with the guy in this story: http://www.startribune.com/587/story/923953.html

Bus Stop, bus go, she stays, what grows?

Wow Metro Transit's #11 route has been horrible lately. On both December 21st and 22nd, the southbound bus I was on drove right past the stop on 3rd Ave and 14th Street, even though there were people waiting there. The second time, I pulled the string and yelled up to the driver that he had missed the stop. He just gave me a dirty look and kept going. Then on Saturday, I was waiting at the stop at 3rd and 19th at 7:20pm to go downtown and the bus drove right past me, even after I waved at it. I hauled it over to Nicollet and got on the 18, which also blew past a stop with a waiting passenger at Grant street, but at least the bus hit a red light and the person was able to catch the bus. Then last night, I waited for the #2 to go Uptown and was about to drive instead when it showed up ten minutes late. Yes, it was snowing, but I have seen drivers refuse to wait 30 seconds for someone who is running for the bus, even after their friends have asked the driver to wait.

I'm really sick of rude drivers, especially when they pull away from the stop before you can sit down and then have to slam on the breaks because they were pulling up to a red light anyway.

Art Car Parade

woodsm has a photoset on flickr of the parade.

Braiding now legal

Remember this post about the unfair licensing requirements for hair braiders in Minnesota? Well, the rules exempting braiders are now in effect, so the system worked.

TJ's is here

Trader Joe's in St Louis Park is open! It looks like they will open some other metro locations in the future.

Webtracks

City Pages' annual Best of edition has pixel art by Eboy, which I dig.

I found this quote on a coaster at a bar, but I like it anyway:
"We do not remember days. we remember moments." -Cesare Pavese
I also like this one: "If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears."

Ever been mistaken for an employee while shopping? I have and it is hilarious.

Myspace is not just for 14-21 year olds - it's for me too.

Trader Joe's is "coming soon" to Minnesota, before the end of May hopefully. I was 100% wrong about the location. I forgot all about Excelsior Boulevard. Could they have built any closer to Whole Foods?

Also, the new library downtown opens May 20th, or for $250 (or more!!) you can attend the benefit on the night of the 19th. This includes a progressive dinner, and I really need to attend something like that.

Transit Woes

Is there something in the water? Twice this week I have boarded a crowded number 11 bus to head home from work and seen almost every seat full except a window seat near the back door. Both times there was a woman sitting in the aisle seat blocking the empty seat and I stood in the aisle and said, "Excuse me." To most people this means, "Could you move for just a second so I can sit down," but not to these ladies. They each just turned their legs into the aisle, leaving about 7 inches for me to squeeze my not-skinny, winter-coat-covered body through! I am tired of seeing people take up more than one seat on the bus, not because they need to, but just so they can be comfortable while other people have to stand. Your bag is not more important than another person, and that other person paid the same fare you did and their butt deserves just as much room as yours does. If you insist on the aisle seat, at least stand up to let a person sit in the window seat when they politely ask you.

In 1998, I was riding the bus home from library and it started to get very crowded. One kid was taking up a whole two seater by stretching his legs out so no one could sit down. A guy asked him to move, and when the kid wouldn't, the guy sat down anyway, pushing the kid's legs further over. They exchanged some choice words and it escalated into a fight when the guy was about to get off the bus. Imagine, two idiots fighting in a 2 1/2 foot wide bus aisle, that is full of other people! I was sitting next to another girl and we both just put our hands over our heads and ducked down. It wasn't long before other passengers got the two to stop fighting and the police arrived. They wanted people to be witnesses, but I had not seen enough to know who had started the fight. I just hope the guy didn't get into any more trouble if the kid was under 18, since the kid was being an ass.

One morning this week I was sitting next to a woman on her cell phone. She told the person on the phone about how drunk she was last weekend and then they get into an argument about how she doesn't want to have a long term relationship. Hey, maybe you should have private conversations in private! There is also a guy who rides my bus home who will talk loudly with anyone around him who will respond. He doesn't seem to understand that whole bus doesn't want to hear his opinion on politics, war, local issues and "that internet".

Passengers are not the only offenders on buses, however. The drivers can also make for a lovely ride. Just before Thanksgiving, I had a driver who made a racist comment about some men he thought were going to board the bus. I was shocked at a the time and couldn't think of anything to say to him. I reported the incident on the website, but haven't heard anything back yet. My sister told me that she recently witnessed and elderly lady fall of a wheelchair lift while it was in motion. The woman had pushed her husband onto the lift and stood behind him while the driver started the lift. After she fell, the driver was mad because he had to fill out a report, and yelled at the woman that she wasn't supposed to be on the lift with the chair. Hmm, I think it's the driver's responsibility to make sure there is only one person on the lift before he starts moving it.

Random

Now this is a Funny Picture.

I got cable installed yesterday, along with a DVR and 6 months of HBO and Showtime. I hope to catch Love Actually this month, since it's a holiday movie.

My last Drawing class was on Monday, and I think I did pretty well. Next up is Environmental History and Modernism (a literature class). Maybe I should decide on a major soon. I will only have 2 generals left after those two classes.

I am trying to get 'organized' while I have some time off of school and a small amount of time off of work. What that means, I am not really sure... some weird combination of FlyLady, GTD and my own systems, I guess.

Transit

I live about twelve blocks from the building I work in, which is another eight blocks away from the school I attend. I take the bus every morning, and at least 3 times a week on the way home, even though I own a car. Parking in downtown Minneapolis is between $9-11 per day and it wouldn't save me that much time anyway. Metro Transit changed the route I ride last year so that it goes down Nicollet Mall instead of using 8th and 9th streets downtown. They reason that it's a more direct route to Northeast Minneapolis. What I don't agree with is placing another route on an already over crowded street, a street that hosts a parade every night in December that requires the busses to be rerouted, as well as a Farmer's Market every Thursday in the summer that makes for a very crowded evening rush. For Metro Transit, rerouting busses means moving them to Hennepin, which is two blocks away from Nicollet and also hosts a few too many bus routes as it is. Doesn't it make sense to move the routes to Marquette, which is only a block away and has express routes on it? Southbound busses could use Marquette and Northbound busses could use Second Ave, as they are both set up to handle one way bus traffic. Another solution would be to move the express routes on Nicollet to Marquette/Second and the local routes to Hennepin. That's something that I've always wondered about, why they have express and local routes on the same street downtown. Express busses are pay-as-you-leave routes in the evening, so they don't waste time waiting for passengers to pay their fare in busy downtown traffic. But it defeats the purpose to put these same routes behind a local bus that has to wait for passengers to pay as they board. When I raised this question to Metro Transit in a recent complaint, they said it's valid but they'd never heard it before, so they weren't going to do anything about it.
Now they are running an experiment where the Nicollet routes will be on Hennepin from 6:30pm to 11:30pm over the summer. They plan to survey their customers, business owners, pedestrians and downtown residents to see what people think of the change. Oh please, let them ask me! I pay $1.75 right now each time I ride, and for that I get a slow ride on a bus with at least one person who smells, one kid who can't keep her hands to herself, and three people talking way too loudly on their phone or to another passenger. They want to raise fares for a local ride to $2.00 this summer.
So, if Personal Rapid Transit isn't coming soon to a metro area near me, then a revamp of Nicollet Mall is needed. Since we are too backward to have any kind of subway system, we need to have a bus tunnel that goes under the current Mall that only allows busses; no taxis, no pedestrians and no bikes. Bikes would be allowed in a special bike route in the middle of the Mall, which would be a version of the current street with a wider sidewalk and curbs that are much closer together. Stairs and ramps would connect the street level to the bus tunnel, and could even rise up to the skyway system. The tunnel could act as a subway station by providing information to those waiting on which busses are nearing the stop, and which ones have already left.
Instead of improving the current system, there are plans to cut back service and raise fares. It doesn't seem like such a pipe dream to me to make transit profitable, or at least reduce it's dependance on government subsidy. It would just take some passion and creativity, or maybe some privatization?

Taxation without Ability

Everything You Know About Taxes is Wrong

This article is an interview with a journalist who has some rather important things to say about America's tax code. It appeared in my local free newspaper, City Pages, which keeps me entertained and somewhat informed every Wednesday.

Metro Area Fun

Last Saturday, I took my first ride on the LRT to the Mall of America. The route finally opened all the way to the mall in December. Even though it was a Saturday night, the trains were only two cars long, which meant almost half of the riders had to stand. There was time when I'd vist the mall on a weekly basis, but now it's more like every few months. I rode Timberland Twister, which is a great rollercoaster that always keeps you guessing as to which way your car is going to dive.

On Sunday, I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. You can check out some of the pictures I took there. It amazes me that admission to their main collection is free, and you only have to pay for special exhibits. I spent three and a half hours there and only got about halfway through. My interests tend toward the ancient Chinese and Indian rooms, and sculpture more than paintings. I guess the modern European stuff is more familiar. I had a similar experience at the Metropolitain Museum of Art in New York, where the room with Thai sculptures really made an impression on me.

Riding the LRT and the Timberland Twister and visiting the MIA are activities that I had been meaning to try, but never got around to doing before. I decided to try to do something new around the Minneapolis/St. Paul area each week.

Ratings:
LRT - 2 stars - too crowded, and not very fast
Timberland Twister - 3 stars - fun, but costs nearly $5 for one ride
MIA - 4 stars - free, and chock full of beauty and history

Idle Chatter

I eat my cereal with chocolate milk on it, which is apparently sick and wrong to some people.

I work downtown and it gets so windy outside my building that it sometimes looks like it's snowing upwards.

105 minutes of Citizenship

I voted this morning. I got to my polling place at 7:15 and I finally got to vote at 9:00. I think they need to cut my district in half, since I was already #298. In four years, we should have the technology to vote online quickly and securely. Who am I kidding? We won't have that 40 years. Hopefully we will know who won the election before Inauguration Day.

I am 32 Flavors and then some

Ooh, a month without a post, my apologies. Much has happened. I moved and I finished Summer Semester. I got an A in both Writing and Trigonometry - yay! I still have to finish my 2 independent studies, though, and I start Acting and Calculus this week.

I went to Wild Mountain yesterday with two of my friends and we had a lot of fun on the alpine slide and go-karts. We certainly have a new summer tradition. We also went tubing down the Apple River in Wisconsin a few weeks ago. We've been doing that since 1999. I got to see my aunt and uncle from Vancouver, Wa last weekend. They were here to bring their daughter to college and look at houses, but they've decided not to move back :-(

Some of my stuff is still in storage, either in a storage unit or my friend's basement. It's like shopping every time I go to pick things up. I need to get the rest of my furniture out soon.

I don't have cable right now, so my hatred for the Olympics has increased since it is one of only 4 things I can watch. I don't even have internet, since the order for my phone service was put in wrong, and will hopefully be fixed by Thursday. So, although I do hate the Olympics, I have seen a lot of it because I watch the Today show in the morning. They're in Athens the whole time and it is cool to see so much of Greece. I really want to visit there, and now the infrastructure has been drastically improved. I think I should start going to every Olympic venue a year later.

Transit Strike

I live in Minneapolis, and our transit workers are on strike right now (issues about health care costs being the main issue). It hasn't affected me much, except I have to park two blocks further from work. However, it has affected my sister, niece and many of my friends a great deal. Even if I didn't know anyone that was having problems because of the lack of busses, I'd still see the need to get the busses back. People have been saying that traffic is better because of the strike, and therefore we shouldn't worry about it. Um, let's try to look at the whole picture. There are people who can't drive due to age or medical restrictions, there are people who don't own cars due to the expense and there are people who choose to ride the bus to save money and reduce pollution. These people do deserve to have options.

Perhaps I am being naive, but why can't we make transit profitable? Right now it is being subsidized by the state and that's part of what bothers people. Even if fares were slightly higher, if it was profitable to run a bus, we'd have less of an issue right now.

As for traffic, if only we had a subway/elevated system, people wouldn't have such an issue with the reduced number of busses on the roads. I doubt that will ever be approved, because of the debacle and debate over Light Rail that we had a few years back.