Microblog

This is the best time of year for local green beans. Got these beauties at the farmers market. Tonight I’ll serve some of them with classic comfort food: baked mac and cheese.

Cycled over to Orchestra Hall for a late afternoon chamber music recital featuring members of the Minnesota Orchestra. The final piece, “Jazz Variations on a Theme by Paganini,” ensured that most of us went home in a good mood.

Watched crews setting up Aquatennial fireworks on Stone Arch Bridge today. This is one of the biggest fireworks shows in the country, expected to draw around 250,000 people to the riverfront tonight. We’ll watch from our balcony.

Diagonal elements can be problematic in LEGO, so I’ve set myself the challenge of building a LEGO Technic model that includes a strong, minimal horizontal structure incorporating diagonal trusses. Today, on my cycle ride, I studied a 140-year-old bridge, looking for inspiration.

Walked with a friend and gawked at one of the oldest (1905) school buildings in Minneapolis, now apartments. Recharged at Key West Bistro with, of course, key lime pie.

Still 88° at 6:00 p.m. Grateful for AC.

Until today, as a native English speaker, I was familiar with the concept of an appositive, though I did not know the term. Discussed the concept of an appositive, a noun or noun phrase that follows a noun and further defines or identifies the first noun, just like in this sentence. Worked through examples with ESL learners without the assistance of Google.

Walked over to Hennepin County Government Center with a bundle of identifying documents to renew my REAL ID-compliant driver’s license. Many people are still opting for the cheaper standard licenses which will no longer be accepted by the TSA to board flights in 2025.

On our Sunday morning walk, the air quality seemed to be improving as we looked towards Downtown from Boom Island. Yesterday, we could smell, taste, and see the smoke pollution from the Canadian wildfires.

Posted Passport Covers. Travel influencers urge us to buy unnecessary gear, such as a document organizer, a hotel room blacklight, or an in-flight clip-on cup holder. I add passport covers to that list.

It has been an inflation-beating week. Tuesday: 20% senior discount at Coastal Seafoods. Later I learned about Wedge Co-op’s 5% off for seniors on Wednesdays. Today: a surprise BOGO (Buy One, Get One) on ice cream at Lunds & Byerlys. (Grand Ole [Creamery] is a local ice cream maker.) Life’s good.

Noticed this announcement at Wedge Co-op where I stopped to cool off with a dish of vegan vanilla coconut milk soft-serve. We spend a lot of our grocery dollars at the Wedge, so I think we’ll be making a point of shopping there on Wednesdays from now on. Maybe we’ll get carded!

With most university students gone for the summer, it was finally possible to quickly snag one of the 14 stools at 1950s-era Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown. The corned beef hash with a fried egg on top in the narrowest restaurant in Minneapolis was sublime.

Cycled down to this Minnehaha Falls overlook to meet my friend for a walk, cuppa, and catch-up.

Hotel rooms in Japan typically provide prefilled coffee filters like these in sealed packets. Today, received empty filters from Amazon we’ll use on future travels to hotels that don’t provide coffee in the room. We’ll simply spoon in ground coffee before pouring the hot water.

Converted our digital recipe box from Evernote to a folder of .docx recipe files in Google Drive. Evernote is changing ownership, with substantial layoffs, which makes me want to secure our recipes in a standard, open, Web-accessible format that is not dependent on a single company.