The Bicycle Tire Thief

Greetings from the/(a) heartland! It feels so....so...AMERICAN here, but in a good way. People say "sow-nah" for "sauna" (okay, that's Finnish) and they grow lots of corn and there's more sky than land though there's plenty of land. I ride over the Mississippi River on my way to work! There are even tornado sirens that let you know you should go down into the basement and wait it out because someone's seen one coming. Tornadoes. The prairie, even.

My internship with PTP has just begun. I even have a PTP t-shirt now, which means that in some fundamental way, I belong. We're organizing a training that starts Sunday for community organizers from London, Tennessee to Oakland, California on framing and messaging, which essentially helps people scrutinize the way they deliver the messages they're trying to spread. It's been a whirlwind of logistics mostly, but it's deeply satisfying to have something concrete and simple to work on before the real fun begins. Which may involve me actually going out on a few limbs, trying things that I haven't done (i.e. who am I to be put in charge of anything relating to "information architecture"?).

I'm considering buying a camera (yes, perennially stingy me!) for all the fabulous things I'm seeing. For now, I can only hint at their allure and mystique.

Bike racks shaped like bikes, a Calatrava-looking bridge, a beautiful mosaic outside of a beautiful co-op grocery store, a street name Minnehaha, and the Mississippi River, of course.

They've realized a dream of mine in this city, the number 2 bike city in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau. A co-worker told me she's not used to biking on trafficked streets because their are so many bike paths! One solution to the perpetual biker-motorist civil war is making two separate --- if not completely, mostly --- sets of roadways. This is unlikely to happen in places where there isn't a great deal of motivation and passion to combat the inertia, the status quo of road domination by vehicles. So my conclusion, of course, is that in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are full of motivated, passionate cyclists. So I'm happy to be here for this reason too. Today, I biked with co-workers H and L to Common Roots for an after-work beer along the Greenway, a bike path built along an old railroad route (the tracks are gone, of course). It's clever because it passes through the important areas of the city but not on the car routes, and it's below the roads, with the train tressels arching above the path. And just in case one hasn't yet had their fill of wild, Minnesota raspberries, the path is lined with them.

So take heed, all you aspiring bike cities: convert your unused railways to bike paths! This does of course attract the aspiring bike thieves. Today, as H and I left the office to grab our bikes and go, a distraught fellow biker with helmet in hand looked sadly at her frame, locked to the stand outside of the office and missing both tires. So I will be bringing my dirty bike with enormous mountain bike tires into the office henceforth.

For now, I'll have to settle for photos I found on the web, but I may just find a camera soon! I bet there's a rowdy bunch of Minn-SP Freecyclers around here.

Je vais dormir!

The Twins

So what I should be doing at the moment...this is always the preface of a blog entry, although soon one of the shoulds will actually be write in a blog (not this one).

I'm writing from Saint Paul, Minnesota, a place I never thought about six months ago.

It's breezy outside, but warm enough for me to need to blow cool breath on my fingers every few words I type. As I began, what I should be doing at the moment is refining the day's intensive anthropological field notes that I took during the first two days of work at my internship at the Progressive Technology Project. These notes are nonexistent but I have made a lot of observations in my first two days. What an exciting place to work! Exciting in a low-key way now. But in a big way if you think architecture and engineering --- the building is completely green, with a rooftop garden complete with a huge solar array, recycled glass ceramic tiles in the bathrooms, low-flow toilets, efficient heating and cooling systems, and a very stylish industrial look (strangely similar to the HQ of my other office in SF).

Instead, I want to reflect on what it's like to be here in MinnesOWta --- this place that is both part of my home country and more foreign to me than at least one foreign country.

First, I'll just give a few key details and elaborate on my experience in a later post. I'm staying with the family of the former director of PTP and they've been extremely welcoming and comfortable with us so far. I say "us" because another Santa Cruzian is here with me, interning with the same org. We have our own rooms in this big, beautiful house that used to be a boarding house, at one time housing 18 people. There are three stories, plus a basement (um...did you say there are tornadoes in Minnesota??). Two kitties come included, Iris and Katie. The worst problem we've encountered so far is TOO MANY RASPBERRIES! And I was sad about leaving all that beautiful fresh produce at the Santa Cruz farmer's market.

That's all for now. So far so good.