Week 3

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'" -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I've seen that quote a few times today, and it bears repeating here (and everywhere, and often).

Five tidbits about the start of the week:

1) My Facebook and Twitter feeds are spreading this news: the Minneapolis-St. Paul area was named America's fittest city, in large part because of the parks and outdoor recreation space I love so much.

2) Some special people have birthdays this week!

3) I ran seven miles this morning, and thanks to yesterday's thaw (35 degrees) and subsequent snowman snow, there was an abundance of snowmen along my route, which I did not expect but enjoyed very much.

4) I got to meet Sara's pup Ramona today, and she is a total sweetheart.

5) I'm paging through A Field Guide to American Houses, which I picked up last week at the library. I've only worked my way through the introductory sections but have already learned a lot about the context behind different neighborhoods in different eras and seen examples from the book in houses along my running routes.

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Over the weekend, my dad's cousin passed away. In memory of her kind spirit and big laugh, I find myself more aware of appreciating the small pieces of each day and being grateful for the people who make our days brighter. What are you grateful for today?

Loppet weekend

It's Loppet time!

I have a family party tomorrow, so I signed up to volunteer with the City of Lakes Loppet Ski Festival to support the Saturday events, which include ice cycling, skijoring (skiing with dogs!), snow orienteering and so on. I helped check in other volunteers and answer questions about the schedule. It was such fun to see skiers wandering through such an urban scene - I can't imagine there are many other cities that could pull off something like this, on this scale.

The long course winds through parks and trail systems all over Minneapolis (cutting across a lake or two) before ideally finishing on Hennepin Avenue near the Lake Street intersection, a major activity and traffic hub in this neighborhood. I've never been in Uptown on a year with enough snow to make the full course (and thus this particular finish line) happen, until today. It was so cool to see!

Here's the finishing stretch, with the banner hanging in the distance:

And here's the turn from Lake Street onto Hennepin:

And a little peek farther away:

I also got to see my friend Lindsay, who volunteers in a year-round role with the foundation and coordinates vendors on race weekend. We zipped outside for a quick photo together at the finish line. (Her idea! I swear!) We picked a nearby guy to ask to be our photographer, and I think Lindsay and I both realized as she was asking that he could not have been less interested in snapping the photo but obliged anyway. Oops. Sorry, dude!

There are tons of events still to come, including the tonight's Luminary Loppet for skiers, snowshoers and walkers - and tomorrow's full schedule, too! If you are local, you must bundle up and check it out!

Friday's five

Consider this the bookend to Marvelous Monday, okay?

Five things I'm loving this Friday:

1) A "meet you at the local grocery store in 10" impromptu visit with Sara.

2) The light snow that is falling gently outside. I am not loving that it covers up a virtual slip-and-slide ice layer on the sidewalks (and probably on the roads, too) but it's beautiful - and a little icing on the cake, I suspect, for...

3) ...the City of Lakes Loppet Ski Festival this weekend in Minneapolis! Although I'm not much in the habit of skiing anymore, some of you know that cross-country skiing is near and dear to my heart. I just stinkin' love that there is a ski race that finishes (when snow allows, which it does this year) on Hennepin Avenue in the middle of Uptown in Minneapolis. The festival includes events for kids and families, all the way up to a 33K race. I have friends who are racing and one friend who is a very active volunteer with the Loppet Foundation, so I picked up a volunteer shift tomorrow morning and am excited to support this event.

4) It's February now! That means that in four short weeks, it will be March, which equates to spring in my book.

5) I attended Yoga Sculpt twice this week, for the first time in ages. My muscles are not loving me for it, but I am pleased.

Yoo hoo! What are you up to this weekend? Were there any tiny moments that made you smile today?

Night at the museum

To the museum we go! It's date night!

I'd been eyeing a couple of Minnesota History Center exhibits for ages and noticed recently that admission is free after 5 p.m. on Tuesday evenings. (Tonight's visit - spoiler alert! - sealed the deal that I simply must just  buy a Minnesota Historical Society membership because I want to support the good work that they do and also visit the History Center anytime.)

The big exhibit right now is called Then Now Wow and pulls together the "wow" moments that define Minnesota's history.

I had been a little uncertain of what to expect because the exhibit is billed as kid-friendly, but it really is just appropriate for everybody. It was, at a minimum, a great overview of what shaped Minnesota for both visitors and longtime residents. There are eras and events in this state's history covered that are challenging to process for people of any age, so in a way, I actually appreciated seeing them presented in a narrative that a wide range of ages could take in.

Anyway, there aren't enough adjectives for how fascinating I found the exhibit, both in terms of the content and how it was assembled. The whole experience is about as far away from the stereotypical quiet museum as you can imagine. It's multisensory and multilayered and interactive and brilliantly creative in conveying an enormous range of Minnesota experiences, people and events in one project. The level of detail is incredible. I was so impressed.

We both learned a lot. Josh gives a thumbs up to Minnesota:

And then we stumbled across a nearby exhibit that was all about Minnesota weather, and the whole visit got even better. Weather!

WEATHER PERMITTING!

Friends, I highly recommend a trip over to the History Center. I'll be back soon, hopefully with a membership card in my hand, because I need to see two more exhibits: Minnesota's Greatest Generation and The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. (And maybe go back for another peek at the weather one, too.)

Race weekend

Not for me! It is for thousands and thousands of other people in Minnesota, though, because it's Twin Cities Marathon weekend! My days will be full because I volunteer with one of the race committees. Today I took a vacation day and squeezed in my weekend long run before kicking off marathon weekend festivities in the afternoon.

I looped around the river road through downtown Minneapolis. It was the coldest run I've done in many months: 37 degrees at the start - but more importantly, so windy. It turned out that I had inadvertently scheduled myself to run the entire first half basically into the wind, followed by the second half with the wind at my back. This was totally a coincidence, but it helped me finish the run feeling jolly instead of miserably cold. I definitely (and I'll say it again: definitely) could have used a pair of gloves during the first half.

It was so pretty out there. I'm feeling like a little bit of a broken record here, but it really was. The sun was brilliant, the clouds were puffy and the blue sky was so vibrant. It was been so gusty here over the past couple of days, but a lot of the leaves are hanging on, too.

First, I took a peek at downtown Minneapolis from under the Hennepin Avenue bridge:

This is what the bridge actually looks like:

Of course, I took a minute to look at leaves:

And I got over to the Lake Street bridge, and the sun was so bright, it ended up looking in photos like how kids draw suns:

The river (and trees along the river) looked beautiful.

That's the report, Reader. Next weekend's run is 12 miles, and the weekend after that is my own race weekend! This weekend, I'm just excited to cheer on friends and family, in one of my favorite races in the world.

Music at the zoo

On July 25, Josh and I went to a concert...outdoors...at the zoo...on a weeknight!

Wild and crazy! And with a brand new hat, to boot!

Not every music fan on the premises could have pulled off that hat, though:

It was my first concert at the zoo (this was Los Lobos, by the way) and it was a good one. I will remember this evening on winter nights for sure. Despite my ever-present dew point-watching this season so far, summer in Minnesota is a lovely thing indeed.

In the news

Some love for the Twin Cities!

Today the American College of Sports Medicine released its annual rankings for the "healthiest/fittest" urban areas, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area topped the list for the second year in a row! I read about it on Runner's World and then clicked through to the organization's news release to see the full list. (Also a must-read over at Runner's World today: the story of a man who is a professional dog runner. But I digress.)

Anyway, the top five are the Twin Cities, D.C., Boston, San Francisco and Hartford. (I have to say I said "Hartford?" out loud, even though I loved my experience running the Hartford Marathon a few years back when I was out east for work.)  Check out the list.  Any surprises?  I'm no urban geographer, but I was surprised to see the Portland-Seattle-Denver trio as "low" as they were (#7-9), since they are the three urban areas that come perhaps the closest to feeling like home to me in terms of the pedestrian- and cycling-friendly infrastructure that makes up a key part of the list's methodology.

I grew up in the Twin Cities. Part of why I love showing visitors around is because I undoubtedly take for granted some of the features that landed my home on top of the list: the extensive trail network, the vast urban park system, the increasing range of sustainable transportation options like bike highways and the light rail.  I like to see the Twin Cities through a visitor's eyes.  The love for my community was a timely reminder to appreciate it - and all of the work that people here have invested in encouraging health.

So, if you're in the Twin Cities, do you agree with the top ranking?  If you live somewhere else, do you think the assessment for your city is spot-on or way off-base?  What improvements have you seen in your community - and tell me: what changes do you still dream about?

Shake it up

This week in St. Paul has been my kind of August.  The high temperatures have been in the upper 70s, the humidity and dew points have retreated sheepishly, and the breeze has been wonderful and laced with almost-fall.  I had to snap a photo as I was walking around St. Paul yesterday because at this time of year, the sky really is that blue and the clouds really are so puffy that they look cartoonish.  The only sky that comes close to Minnesota's in August is Colorado, where the color is always a rich, rich blue every time I visit--and the sky seems bigger on the plains there, too.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm no night owl.  In fact, I'm just lousy at staying up late.  I'm also lousy at sleeping late in the morning but need copious blocks of sleep, so that drives my bedtime earlier.  Before I go on and make myself sound like even more of a wet blanket, I'll get to the point.  If I can fight my internal clock tonight, I'm going to stay up late and watch the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks today and is one of the best meteor showers all year.  Astronomy is another long-time hidden love of mine, and I have a strange hodge-podge of constellation and planetary fun facts stored up thanks to Dayton Elementary's library.  I've only actually seen the meteor shower once, when we were on a family vacation way up north a long time ago, and it was amazing.  Tonight, I would like to drive out to the country far suburbs and check it out.

Yesterday, dangerously toeing the boundary of my non-night-owlness, I ventured out of my comfort zone and went to a play on a weeknight.  The Minnesota Fringe Festival runs just through this weekend, so I was running out of time to see my friend Isabel's play, Red Resurrected.  I grabbed a ticket to the 8:30 p.m. show and headed over to The Lab Theater in Minneapolis's Warehouse District.  I got there early, in time to wander around a neighborhood that I rarely explore and then in time to get way, way at the back of the line of theatergoers after my walk.

Here are the views from my walk--the Minneapolis skyline and the Mississippi River:

The Fringe Festival is something I've had on my should-attend list for at least three years, but this was my first show, and I had no idea what to expect.  I've heard people describe the festival as a wide spectrum of real hits and, well, real misses, and Isabel's play was a real hit.  I'm no theater critic, but Isabel is super-talented, I got completely drawn into the hour-long play, and the music and stage and acting was beautiful.  There you have it: go see it this weekend!

Next: I have been bouncing off the walls this week because I'm flying to California tomorrow morning for a weekend with my wonderful friend Nat.  Nat is getting married in three weeks!  I've seen her regularly enough since graduation because I've taken annual work trips to her part of the world, but my work schedule during those trips limited our face time to a short lunch every year. That's not enough!  I am so excited to spend a whole weekend with her (and her fiancé too!).

Last but not least, I had a Cherry Dilly Bar yesterday, and I think it changed my life.