Not Bluebells

The little blue flowers I mentioned in my signs of Spring post are actually crocus. They blossomed this morning. . .lovely little flowers.

Gwen Ifill at Westminster

5 or 6 times in the Spring and Fall, Westminster Presbyterian Church (located on Nicollet Mall in beautiful Downtown Minneapolis) hosts a series of speakers on a particular topic with bearing on current events during their Town Hall Forums. This past Tursday I saw Gwen Ifill of PBS fame speak there. I've never seen it so crowded, or with such a diverse crowd (in both age and skin tone). If you're interested in listening to her speech and the question and answer session that followed you can listen to it here.

US Courthouse Plaza

I was having a crappy day on Wednesday, sadly I thought it was Thursday so it only got worse, but I figured a visit to one of my favorite parks might turn things around.

I'd love to tell you who made the bronze castings that are on the mounds in this park, but for some reason there isn't much information available on the web, or at the site itself. I did stumble across an interesting website about the excavation of the site before they built the park and courhouse there, but it doesn't say anything about the building or it's art embellishments anywhere. Upon closer review of the photo of the three creatures carrying a more rotund rolly poly creature (toward the bottom of the post) I see that the name "Tom O." is carved into his underside with the date 1999. So Tom created this little fantasy land, but that's all I can tell you.













The building directly to the left, that sort of looks like a castle, is City Hall. If you're in the mood to weigh yourself, there is a neat old scale inside the arched doorway to your right.



I think what I like most about this park is the domestic nature of the activities the castings are participating in. . . tourism, lawn maintenance, loafing, observing. Idyllic society, lacking the crappy or rowdy elements that are so pervasive elsewhere.

Visit to the Great Blues

We took a second bike ride on Saturday afternoon to see what the Great Blue Herons were up to since our last visit. It appears they've been on a nonstop nest building tear. This guy was taking a brief break before heading out for more branch bits to fortify his/her nest.




I spent a lot of time writing this bit, so I just can't bear to delete it. However, I was informed by the guy that checks the 311 emails at 10:45 in the evening that this lovely brick building I mistook for a water treatment plant is actually a building used for training seminars held by the city and as a kennel for K9 officers (i.e. police dogs). I also learned that the sand beds that used to make our water not taste nasty have been replaced by some high tech tube system that doesn't appear to work at all for removing flavors from our water. Thank god we spent millions of dollars on a state of the art facility. . .[I don't know how I managed to not notice the last time we were here how nice the water treatment plant looks from this side of the river. Yes Minneapolitans, that is where your river water comes from, a lovely brick structure in North East. Actually the water treatment methods they use are pretty cool-- sedimentation basins and mixed media filters (to get most of the ucky tastes/smells out) with 25 billion gallons of water pulled out of the Mississippi and distributed to Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs a year. My husband toured this facility (I think it was this one)in college and I think it was the coolest field trip I got to experience second hand my entire student career.]





My little Canon SD1100 felt completely inadequate next to the lens this photographer had. She had to rest it on the ground after each round of quick fire shots it was so heavy.