Walked with friends towards donuts.
Category: In This Together
Needs Must
Friends, visiting Minneapolis from Oregon, had to cancel our get-together because COVID hit. So, we opened bottles of wine and got together via Google Meet. The special bottle of New Zealand wine they’d brought for us was enjoyed remotely, but not by us.
A Step Back in Time
After a university campus walk with a friend, warmed up with coffee and freshly baked vegan muffins at Hard Times Cafe. Collectively owned by the workers, it has a 70’s ambiance and an ideology I’ve seen described as punk and hippy.
Christmas Eve
Kicked off the festivities with lefse for lunch (a nod to Norway, Dwight’s distant heritage). Tonight: fish pie (a nod to the UK, my heritage). Christmas Day dinner will nod to North Africa (just because…).
Civil Society
Watched daytime television. Grateful for the rule of law.
Socializing by Design
On my Minneapolis Skyway walk: an example of designing out antisocial behavior. Target recently redesigned this lobby to eliminate disruptive loitering. It seems to be working. The mural in my Monday post is another example: it’s discouraging graffiti.
The Last Straw
Congratulations to my nemesis, Ch*ga, on being permanently banned from Truth Social for posting a Vanity Fair cartoon implying the former president’s winery produces subpar products. Click through, the plot thickens.
El Mesias
Tonight at Orchestra Hall: A “bilingual Spanish-English cross-cultural combination” of Handel’s Messiah and Navidad Nuestra, a cantata by Argentinian composer Ariel Ramírez. We’re reminded the Holy Family were refugees. “Pretty child don’t cry my love / we will arrive at a better land.”
No Longer Taken for Granted
It did my heart good to see school buses lined up outside the Guthrie Theater this morning. For a year and a half, during the early days of the pandemic, the building was lifeless. Tonight we’ll walk over to see Leo Kottke performing on the Thrust.
Light Sunday Reading
Started into a new biography of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI and its precursor through six presidents from 1924 up to his death in 1972. I expect the book will help me to better understand divisions in today’s America and reinforce my belief we mustn’t regress to the 1950’s.