Beautiful downtown Robbinsdale
It was a weekend of detours, of cancellations and adjustments. You might be able to do what you planned this past weekend, if you had the misfortune to be me, but you had to find a new approach.
The pattern for our days in this neck of the woods has been hot weather with vicious storms overnight. Rinse, repeat. Wherever you travel in the Twin Cities, you see branches on the ground. Small branches most everywhere, large branches here and there, and now and then a whole tree keeled over onto somebody’s home or car.
I myself didn’t suffer any damage I’m aware of. But I saw some.
On Saturday I took myself off to Culver’s, a fine hamburger establishment on which I’d decided to bestow my business that day. As I drove off I saw the beginnings of what would be a momentous event in the history of my town. The street one block over from me was abundant with rivers of water, and what looked like a fountain was bubbling up in the midst of it (probably, I assume, from a manhole cover). The little park alongside was filling up with brown runoff. Police were just then pulling up to cordon the street off.
When I got back from lunch the flooding was more extensive. I was temporarily the owner of property with a lake view, though it was a pretty dirty lake.
Eventually I learned what had happened. The flooding near me was only a by-product of a larger problem another block up the hill, where a water main had burst and scoured out a twenty foot sinkhole. The fountain I saw must have been pressurized water from the storm sewer. On Sunday, after the water main had been capped and the water mostly drained off, I hiked up to take a closer look and took the photograph above, from the parking lot of the McDonald’s.
I was home on Sunday because a planned Viking event at the Swedish Day celebration in Minneapolis had been cancelled due to wet ground and likely rain. In the afternoon, unsurprisingly, the sun came out and the day turned beautiful. Just to spite us.
I’m told it will take at least two weeks to close up the sinkhole and re-open the street, but I’ve been bypassing it already on my daily commute, since it’s closed for repair further west.
I was not terribly sorry to be done with this weekend.
And to get back to work, where we have a virus in the computer system, and they’re still trying to clean up my office computer, which I surrendered on Friday. I think I heard the IT person on the phone, requesting a bell, a book, and a candle.
Getting to this late–was that a Zork reference?? Love it.
I don’t think Lars has played Zork, that classic text adventure game, so the line “You can’t get there from here” is from another source. It’s an old joke, isn’t it?
I meant the bell book and candle part–though I guess that might not be exclusive to Zork. That’s where MY mind went, anyway.
Oh, heh. I should have seen that. No, those are classic exorcism tools. Where were you during Occult Studies 201?
I apparently didn’t make it past 101. Actually I never made it past that part of the game, which is why I remember it–I could never win Zork because I couldn’t get into hell!!
Oh, I remember that part now. Once you got through the gates of hell, you picked up something and ran out. I think you just had to use the tools in order. Light the candle, ring the bell, and read from the book, then the demons would run.
Maybe you had to snuff out the candle too. I forget. Wikipedia isn’t helping. [Ok, I looked up a walkthrough that said to ring the bell and then light the candles before reading.]
I know nothing of Zork. As Phil said, “bell, book, and candle” refers to classic tools of exorcism. There’s a movie of that title, starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, as I recall.
Hm, maybe if I had seen the movie I could have beaten the game… *you have been eaten by a Grue*
You’re really not missing anything, Lars. It was one of these old text-only infocom games. It did teach me the word “verbosity” however.
I first heard the “You Can’t Get there from here” line from a friend who had lived in New Hampshire. Asking for directions from an old timer in a small town he was told, “You can’t get there from here.” He then was told the route to drive to another town. He was then informed, “You can get there from there.”
Ogden Nash entitled one of his poem collections You Can’t Get There From Here, as I recall. I’ve always thought it was a neat, subtle joke.