Epilogue to Hunky Dory

Oh, I forgot to mention that my hard drive on my laptop fried and I may lose all of my data, including three years of pictures, six years of financial records, and the recipe for spicy sesame noodles. That's the antithesis of hunky dory. Or, it chubs the nub, man.

Boy Returns All Hunky Dory

I'm back from a kick ass hunky dory trip to the Boundary Waters, complete with a driving rainstorm as we canoed out on our last day. Max and his friend Alice were troopers the entire time, their first real adventure camping. We had some fear of hypothermia in the kids on our last day as the cold rain just kept coming down and down and down, but we improvised some warmth and got out alive. Now I'm back to the reality of mildewed clothes, wet sleeping bags and a new job, which I started Tuesday.

It's hunky-dory. Nice partners, great support staff, super interesting work, and a whole mess of it, from family law to trust and estate litigation to employment litigation. Dan, one of the partners, and I make up the litigation team, so I'll be doing skads of litigation. That's hunky-dory with me. More later.

Where Am I Going?

A rather bizarre day physically today. First, it was my last day of being on the payroll of Project 504, the little nonprofit I run. A court clerk made me a nice cake, which was super sweet, the cake and the gesture.

But before court this morning, I dropped Max off at school and then went to the gym to do some weights so that I don't become skin and bone. After the dips, pull ups, sit ups, etc., I went to the locker room to shower and, as I sometimes do, weighed myself on the scale that always begs to be used. 148 pounds, which is good, as it means I've gained about five pounds. With all the running and biking, I'm having trouble keeping on the weight, which also explains the weight-lifting regimen. Anyway, I go to court, a meeting, yadda yadda yadda, then take some time off in the afternoon to fit in a 15 mile run for my marathon training. I plan the run to start and end at the gym so I can take a shower and move on with the day. The run goes very well and I'm feeling great. I get back to the gym and do the usual shower routine and, for the hell of it, weigh myself again. 140 pounds. An eight pound weight loss in the span of 8 hours. I weigh myself again--same thing. And the first weigh-in this morning was no mistake either, as I double checked it then too. It's bizarre, and I wonder where all of me is going.

Well, literally, I'm going to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) tomorrow with Max, his friend Alice and her father Matt. It will be my sixth time there, but my first with kids, and Max's first camping trip. So, you won't hear from me for a few days, five to be exact.

Cue Up That Dylan Song

It turns out that I haven't kept folks up to speed on my job and life. First, I accepted the job offer I mentioned earlier, and on September 20 I'm joining a small law firm. It's in Edina, and I'll be the fifth attorney in the firm. I'll do mostly civil litigation work--suing people or defending people who are being sued. It will be a huge change for me, but one that intuitively feels right. I've sent out a letter to all the supporters of my little nonprofit organization, and folks have been super kind in wishing me all the best. I'm actually going to hang on for a bit as the unpaid Executive Director until we have new leadership in place.

I'm also well along with dating, and if you can put two and three together you've figured out I'm dating a woman who lives in Northfield, Minnesota. She teaches at one of the colleges there, drives a Volvo, cooks a mean meal, and speaks Italian. Anyway, despite all the razzing I get from my dating advisor, I've managed to stay out of dorkville these days. Though I haven't told my advisor that my professor friend is, well, now my girlfriend. Yeah, we managed to get over the status of 'just dating' and enter the realm of girlfriend-boyfriend. And, despite what anyone ever says, there is little maturity in dating--it's just like it was back in high school, with one important exception: you can more readily laugh at how stupid you feel and how funny the whole business is.

Hoofin' It

Man, I spoke too soon about how easy it is to ride to or from Northfield. On a trip on my bike this past weekend, I not only baked in the sun but got blown about by a wicked northeasterly wind. The worst is between here and Rosemount, where there are hills galore and a wind that actually required me to pedal hard downhill, just to get downhill. Nearly as bad were the open areas between the sod farms around Farmington. There, the wind just races across one sod field to another, and I was the only thing apparently getting in the way. Ugh.

By the way, there was a story in the Pioneer Press this weekend entitled "Hate Traffic? Hoof It." It was about $25 million coming into the region to help promote bicycle commuting and walking. The article noted that:

more than 2.5 percent of Twin Cities residents bicycle to work, one of the highest rates in the nation, said Don Pflaum, a Minneapolis transportation engineer and the city's bike coordinator.

If I had some of that money, we could make a pretty cool bike lane all the way down Route 3, promoting bike commuting between here and Faribault. Just think of all the Faribault Falcons waiting to hop on Schwinns to come up here.

'On Your Left'

With a heightened focus on the mostly poor and predominantly black families in New Orleans who have suffered from governmental indifference, not only now but for years, there was a seemingly unrelated item in the Sunday New York Times that caught my attention. It's not that New Orleans is any different than the rest of the country--rather, it has forced us to see our two-tiered society at work, at its worst. We have been building and ignoring little pieces of New Orleans all over the country. From the story in the New York Times, September 4, 2005:

The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make - $365,826 compared with $7,047 - which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents.

That represents a substantial widening of the income gap from previous years. In 1980, the top fifth of earners made 21 times what the bottom fifth made in Manhattan, which ranked 17th among the nation's counties in income disparity.

By 1990, Manhattan ranked second behind Kalawao County, Hawaii, a former leper colony with which it had little in common except for that signature grove of palm trees at the World Financial Center. The rich in Manhattan made 32 times the average of the poor then, or $174,486 versus $5,435.

Boy Rides Through Farms

To honor the farmers who have abandoned me, I rode my bike from Northfield to St. Paul yesterday. The route meanders through huge sod farms, small dairy farms, and large new housing developments, including one south of Farmington that promised "Providence: Urban Townhomes." I had no idea that Farmington was urban, though I'm told Northfield is now considered part of the South Metro area.

The ride along Highway 3 was great--about 38 miles from house to house, with wide shoulders along the highway, old farms, a few saloons, and rolling hills toward the end until you hit Robert Street. I passed through Farmington and made a mental note of the new Starbucks in Rosemount. I even rode up Ramsey Hill in St. Paul, probably one of the biggest hills in the metro area, and the first time I've managed to pedal up the entire hill.