A pleasant walk on a summer's evening
Jun. 24th, 2006 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkI love to walk. I'd like it even better if I weighed less and it didn't make my legs so tired, but I still love it. Instead of biking to Lake Harriet last night at sunset, I walked (saving my biking muscles for today's project). A block from my house I stopped to chat with a woman taking potted plants out of her car and arranging them on a former boulevard elm that had been reduced to a 4-foot high pedestal. She's a sculptor, and is gradually turning her front yard and boulevard into one of those controlled-chaos types of garden that have become so popular in South Minneapolis. There are 3 or 4 of them on that block alone (40xx Pleasant), each quite attractive in its idiosyncratic way.
On 41st street I ran into Sue K walking her bearded collie. We used to work together at Network Systems. She's at Medtronic now, thinking about retirement plans.
It was almost dark when I got to the lake. I sat down by my favorite fountain, the one with all the turtles shooting water from their mouths. While I rested my feet for the walk home I started playing with my new phone, and the next thing you know I had spent 50 of my 1000 prepaid minutes downloading a game. Down the slippery slope. What can I say? Bejeweled looks SO much better in color! And the colors on my RAZR's screen are so bright and clear! It's like a whole different game with those colors, like sorting through a bowl of glass beads.
Just as I got to my first bonus level, a neatly dressed polo-shirt kind of guy came up to me, gestured towards the fountain, and said, "Do you realize that this is the last remnant of the closest thing that Minneapolis ever had to a rail palace??"
"Huh?" I blinked.
Yep, it seems that the fountain was originally down in the Gateway area of Minneapolis (south of the Hennepin Ave bridge), and was intended to be part of a magnificent Union Station style "rail palace" that never got built. Eventually the much more modest depot was built a few blocks to the east and the fountain was moved to the Rose Gardens. OK, that's kind of interesting, in a histori-geek kind of way. "And how do you know so much about it?" I asked politely. Seems he'd happened to watch a show called "Lost Twin Cities" and was so full of information that he just had to share. He didn't seem interested in striking up a longer acquaintance, he just had to pass on this new knowledge that was burning a hole in his brain. Having made his information dump, he wandered away. His parting words were, "That's what this city really needs, you know. A rail palace!" I went back to playing Bejeweled.
Fun walk.
On 41st street I ran into Sue K walking her bearded collie. We used to work together at Network Systems. She's at Medtronic now, thinking about retirement plans.
It was almost dark when I got to the lake. I sat down by my favorite fountain, the one with all the turtles shooting water from their mouths. While I rested my feet for the walk home I started playing with my new phone, and the next thing you know I had spent 50 of my 1000 prepaid minutes downloading a game. Down the slippery slope. What can I say? Bejeweled looks SO much better in color! And the colors on my RAZR's screen are so bright and clear! It's like a whole different game with those colors, like sorting through a bowl of glass beads.
Just as I got to my first bonus level, a neatly dressed polo-shirt kind of guy came up to me, gestured towards the fountain, and said, "Do you realize that this is the last remnant of the closest thing that Minneapolis ever had to a rail palace??"
"Huh?" I blinked.
Yep, it seems that the fountain was originally down in the Gateway area of Minneapolis (south of the Hennepin Ave bridge), and was intended to be part of a magnificent Union Station style "rail palace" that never got built. Eventually the much more modest depot was built a few blocks to the east and the fountain was moved to the Rose Gardens. OK, that's kind of interesting, in a histori-geek kind of way. "And how do you know so much about it?" I asked politely. Seems he'd happened to watch a show called "Lost Twin Cities" and was so full of information that he just had to share. He didn't seem interested in striking up a longer acquaintance, he just had to pass on this new knowledge that was burning a hole in his brain. Having made his information dump, he wandered away. His parting words were, "That's what this city really needs, you know. A rail palace!" I went back to playing Bejeweled.
Fun walk.
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Date: 2006-06-24 04:44 pm (UTC)That's my favorite fountain there too, Kevin prefers the other one down there. Didn't know or recall that about the fountain, though I own one of the two (IIRC) Lost Twin Cities books and I think I saw the special on PBS way back when. (I'm fascinated by that stuff. Though I get all sad when I think about the movie palaces that are no more.)
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Date: 2006-06-24 04:46 pm (UTC)I loved Bejewelled. I bought a copy that worked on my old Windows 98 PC, but it's incompatible with anything I have now, and I miss it. Sigh. Incredibly addicting.
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Date: 2006-06-24 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 01:39 am (UTC)P.
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Date: 2006-06-25 03:50 pm (UTC)