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Showing posts from July, 2017

Airbnb to the Rescue!

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We decided to get out of town while Jeff paints the main level of our home. He's using oil-based paint on the trim and it's not healthful to stay there—plus, paint fumes do a number on my head and are a trigger for my Cluster Headaches. The Airbnb we're staying in is just a few blocks from Lake Nokomis, under the approach path to runway 12L at MSP. We've been lucky that the air traffic since we've been here has been departing to the south and southeast which leaves us with only arrivals overhead. They're much lighter on the throttles than departures and not at all an issue—we hear them but they don't get in the way of our conversation. I'm kinda curious to hear how loud departure traffic would sound from inside our well-insulated abode but unless things change soon, I'll never know because we're checking out in the morning and heading for home. It's been nice having different scenery for my walks. I could get used to this area. We've

Construction Everywhere, Almost!

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Road repair on the 30-year-old streets in our neighborhood is in full swing. It looked like a military construction battalion had descended on Jalisco Terrace one week ago Monday as huge rigs with big scoops and lots of beeping, blocked off sections of the street while workers in hardhats took over our once quiet neighborhood. They wasted no time in breaking through the asphalt to access water main connections 12 feet beneath the surface to replace them as part of the preventative maintenance aspect of their work. Each home will be assessed at around $3000 for the work which seems like a fair amount to me. We received a notice on our front door this afternoon advising us that they'll be replacing the curb at the threshold of our driveway on Monday and that we won't be able to pull our cars in or out across it for 6 days afterward while the cement cures. It actually seems a fitting time considering the inside of our home has been torn up for the past 6 weeks—why not the outsid

Retracing Steps and Reminiscing

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This is a continuation of my previous post . I left the gravel road and drove north along Lincoln Ave toward the west side of downtown Huron. I was reminiscing about the time I went for a run early in my running days and rather than the typical 2 to 3-mile loop I was accustomed to then, I kept running up Lincoln Ave into downtown then east beyond the James River and past the beef processing plant. I didn't stop until 9.6 miles later when I returned home. My quads were so sore. My cardiovascular system was up to the task but my legs weren't quite there yet. I soaked in a warm tub to try and ease the pain. The demographics of Huron have changed considerably since the mid-'80s when the population was overwhelmingly white. There's now a noticeable presence of Hispanic and Karen people (an ethnic minority from Myanmar) who came for jobs in the turkey processing plant—by far the largest employer in town. The beef processing plant is long since gone. I doubt there's