« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Click on pictures to enlarge. |
This golden dino is found at the corner of 7th Place and Sibley just steps away from its sponsor Atlas Staffing at 189 7th Place E. I wonder if it's golden to show the coin one can make when you use the Atlas Staffing services?
One of the biggest complaints from St. Paul outsiders is the lack of organization in the St. Paul streets. Finding a St. Paul house to show is like finding a needle in the haystack. Unless you have memorized the St. Paul streets, they are impossible to navigate. We've all been lost from time to time, but it's easier to do in St. Paul.
The Gross Report, a local blog written by a recent immigrant to Minneapolis, gave me a label for St. Paul's lack of system. It's call a "non-grid" system of roadways. Not only do the street names have no organized system, but each block is NOT assigned a set of 100 numbers. In St. Paul you might drive 3 or 4 blocks before finding the next group of 100 numbers. Jesse Ventura was not too far off in his suggestion as to how the city was organized. There appears to be no rhyme or reason.
Minneapolis is not so hard to navigate IF one knows the system. One hundred numbers are assigned to each block so the further north or south one travels from center city, the higher the numbers. If the house number being sought is 805, it will be in the 8th block south or north of the center city (except in nord'east Minneapolis). The streets with names are alphabetical so if you can say your abc's, you can find the street. The problem is there is more than one set of alphabets because they created too many streets for just one.
Nord'east Minneapolis is a kingdom of its own. Traveling north from the river brings the traveler to "southeast" addresses even though the streets increase numerically. Hennepin Avenue is the point of change to "northeast" but the street numbers continue to increase numerically. Once the streets align to a north/south and east/west grid, the street names are the names of the presidents in the order of their service and the numbered streets continue to increase by block. It's an easy system IF you memorized your presidents in school!
By the Gross Report's definition, Minneapolis is partially a grid system and relatively easy to navigate, but St. Paul . . . Well, when I figure it out, I'll let you know what the secret is!
Maureen McCabe of ColumbusBestBlog, my fairy blogmother, was memed and shared her media consumption habits as a result. Maureen has now passed the honor to me. Instead of sharing 5 things no one knows about me (which I've done 3 or 4 times now and have run out of secrets!), I'll follow Maureen's example and talk about my media consumption. This morph in the meme is a perfect example of how a meme evolves and becomes better at distracting us.
To share the honor of describing their media consumption, I meme The Codgers Jay and Medford, Linda Davis of Eastern Connecticut, Lisa Dunn of Real Sage Advice, and Carole Cohen of Cleveland, Ohio.
It's travel season in Minnesota. Despite high gas prices and the 4th falling midweek, Minnesotans are on the road! I joined the exodus this last weekend and had a delightful two days with grandchildren and small town Minnesota.
Gibbon was the halfway mark so the grandkids had to get out of the car. They were getting weary of confinement. Of course, no one worried about my arthritic joints that had locked permanently into a sitting position and needed pry bars to move them out. Once in an upright position, nature followed and facilities were needed. Will the bathroom in this little used furniture store accommodate us?
"Don't worry, Mom. This bathroom's much cleaner than the one down the road," was my daughter's encouraging word.
Alone in the little room with the door locked, I wanted to shout, "Are you sure?"
