twin-cities

S. and I took a little excursion to Lake Como this morning for Ingress purposes and wound up doing the mile and a half loop around the lake, just because it was pretty. Along the way we realized that this was a chunk of the St. Paul Grand Round (not to be confused with Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway, although they run parallel for a while). So because I am an OCD completist, I took this as an opportunity to start marking our progress along the full route. See the little tiny bit we’ve done around Lake Como? ...

As is strictly obligatory in Minnesota, we visited the State Fair this week. Good way to burn a day while waiting for our things to arrive, although the minimalist lifestyle wasn’t so bad. We missed the TV, though, since it’s our only way to watch movies together. Anyhow, the bus ride to the Fair was super-easy and we went on a traditionally low-attendance day, which means it was only slightly jam-packed. ...

So that’s the first week in the Twin Cities. We’re loving it so far although we’re about ready to get our stuff back; fortunately it shows up Tuesday. I dropped an AirTag in one of the moving boxes to figure out if it’d be an effective tracker and it sure was; I can see our things in a warehouse to the northwest after a somewhat alarming trip down to Chicago. ...

In my inevitable quest to learn more about the history of our new home in the Twin Cities, I recently read Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs as a primary source on the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. That strike was a significant moment in US labor history, beginning a shift towards industrial unionism – the idea that all workers in a given industry should be part of the same union, rather than organizing unions by trade. It also, not coincidentally, triggered real growth for the Teamsters and was one of the turning points leading American Trotskyists to split from the Stalinist Communist Party USA. ...

I’m sitting on the Coho Ferry on the way to Victoria; I’ve got one last Ingress key drop to make before we leave the area. Admittedly this is also serving the purpose of checking off one more ferry we hadn’t tried in the past. There’s something kind of romantic about driving to a small city on the edge of America to take a small ferry to a city that always feels like a lost outpost of the British Empire. Naming their big luxury hotel the Empress probably has something to do with that feeling. ...