Fargo is flat, really, really flat. It’s a grid city with wide avenues that are seemingly all under construction. There are neat little houses with neat little yards, but more than that, there are cookie cutter developments, row after row after row of beige homes that all look exactly the same, with drying lawns out front, with trucks in the driveways, with young moms. Fargo is dusty and the air is cool and it reminds me of frontier towns in Alaska more than anything, were frontier towns in Alaska surrounded by the suburbs of my nightmares.… continued…
Do people keep telling you that video is the “new thing for your blog!”? Yeah, they keep telling us that too. I have personally been terrified to head down that path, fearing that I will be lured in to a false sense of confidence about the ease of producing decent short video and then, I will waste countless hours trying to unravel the tools and processes of video editing. No way, I said, no way, repeatedly quoting a speaker I heard at a blogging conference: “If you’re going to do video, do it well.”
You know where this is going, right?… continued…
Last night, in the dense humidity, I strolled the Magnificent Mile with a friend. There are some cool things about the promenade — the wacky giant sculpture of the couple in American Gothic, the splendid, almost Venetian water tower, the flower beds, and, of course, the never ending display of humans.
The strapping lad in white pants, a bright green John Deere t-shirt that was a size too small, flip flops, and at his side, an elegant greyhound.… continued…
Given that we’ve just spent six nights camping, folding tents and stuffing sleeping bags and stumbling off to less than immaculate shared facilities every morning, we’d be pretty easy to impress with accommodations. A narrow bed with more than a half an inch of padding would have done me nicely, and a bathroom that maybe fewer than a dozen people share.
That’s not to say we’re not totally pleased with our landing pad. It’s swell, more than swell.… continued…
