east-lake.net

Yesterday morning my family met up at the Mall of America for the annual Race for the Cure walk for breast cancer research. Over 50,000 people registered for the walk, making it the second largest walk in the country (so I’ve heard). My mother was diagnosed ten years ago this year and thankfully she is perfectly fine now. But the walk is a reminder of the nearly 40k women that die from it every year.

Here are my pictures from the walk, and some others by anglerove

The day started out with questions about the weather, there was a chance of rain and it was going to be cold. So we layered up and brewed some coffee and headed over to the light rail. The trains were packed but we could get on, even with the loads of families with stroller and wagons.

We walked three miles around the MOA area, which, with the crowds and the bathroom breaks, ended up taking about 3 hours. By the time we got back to the MOA, we were near the end of the pack, so most had left the area which meant we missed a lot of the freebies.

After the walk, the family headed back to my house to grill and enjoy some lovely treats from the cupcake lady.

Spying on J-Me at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, Maine. He’s the one with the baseball cap in the middle of the photo.

We told our parents this weekend, but also wanted to share with everyone here!!! We are super excited and looking forward to this new life challenge. Yes, I know news like this should be given in person, but blogging it just seemed right.

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Today marks my 7th anniversary of blogging, first at brianmoen.com and now at East-Lake.net (though I’ve had a website of some sort since ‘98). Pretty crazy to think that I’ve been doing this for that long. I have my old entries saved on my computer at home, but never imported them when I switched to wordpress. I really should do that sometime just so I can look back to those good old days.

03/14/2001 - Getting up for work this morning was very difficult. I did three loads of laundry last night and didn’t get to bed till past midnight. But it’s so nice to slip on toasty warm flanel pants and shirt. Especially on those nights when it gets closer to zero degrees.

See also:
6 Years of Blogging
5 Years of East-Lake.net

Thanks to my yearly reminder from Kottke, who started ten years ago today.

Star Tribune Staff Writer Steve Brandt brought up the topic on the Minneapolis Issues Forum regarding 2008 home assessments that were recently mailed out. Looks like he was doing a little research for his article that came out a few hours later.

The latest city assessments are bringing some unusual news to much of Minneapolis: Home values are dropping. Drops of $20,000 to $30,000 are not uncommon in middle-class areas of south Minneapolis, where just a few months ago the assessor was expecting values to remain stable.

Anissa Hollingshead on the Issues Forum wrote up an excellent post on the issue of how the city would react to the housing market when doing the assessments, and also regarding the idea that property taxes might also go down.

Regardless of individual assessed values, the city still needs the same or more revenue. If the tax base is smaller, it seems to figure that taxes will probably have to go up to compensate. Thus, any decrease in value doesn’t hold any promise of a decrease in taxes.

Here’s the link to the City’s property valuation page for my house that we bought this summer. Looking back, I wish we could have remained homeless for a few more months. I love our house, but we probably could have found an ever better place for a little less. Oh well.

Anyone do anything fun? Tricia and I used the extra goose from Christmas and made a Goose Soup and watched Project Runway Canada. Then she left for a friend’s party while I stayed home, had a few beers, and watched crappy TV while trying to design a closet system for one of our main floor bedrooms. How exciting!

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. The weather is cool and about to get colder, I love the fall colors, and it’s all about comfort food - turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie - damn I’m getting hungry, and of course it’s always great to be with family.

Continue reading ‘Happy Thanksgiving!’

When we got back from the cabin Sunday night, I went to turn on the furnace, setting it to 65 to get the chill out of the room. An hour went by and we heard the fan turn on, but the house wasn’t getting any warmer. In fact, it got colder as only cold air was coming out of the vents.

Continue reading ‘Stupid Modern Heating Machines’

Tricia and I went up to the family cabin this weekend just north of Dorset, MN. It was a short trip, going up Saturday morning and back last night, but even 2 days up there is better then nothing. It was a weekend mixed of work, relaxing, and a much needed mental break.

Continue reading ‘Fall Weekend at the Cabin’

Last week I made my final car payment on my 2001 Nissan Altima, which felt about as good as it gets. Not having that stupid expense each month made me realize how I never want to do that again, even though I’m sure I probably will. Ever since I bought the car, I’ve been really good at recording each trip to the gas station, always filling it up and keeping track of the cost, miles driven and gallons so I could later enter it into Excel.

Continue reading ‘Gas Records (I’m a Big Dork)’