A bridge, a basement, a clarification

A few updates are needed.

First, a clarification about our mini-vacation trip next week, which includes a visit to my dear friend, S:

Don't let your imaginations get the better of you, folks. We (S, my wife and I) are, indeed, going to be a threesome for a while. The threesome will (A) ride in a car, (B) visit a museum, (C) walk around some gardens, (D) have lunch in a restaurant, and (E) visit a park. I'm guessing on the last one. We will be standing, walking, riding and sitting together. We won't be lying together.

S and I may have some "by ourselves" time when we can talk. But it would happen as we sit on a bench or as we walk around, in plain sight of anybody who cares to look. We'll probably hug when we meet and when we part. Maybe there will be a kiss. Maybe we'll hold hands for a while. I hope so. But that's as intimate as it will guess. And we both know that.

S and I have the same beliefs about non-monogamy as we have had. But her husband told her we could meet as long as there is no sex, and she and I are both willing to meet on those terms. In fact, he is invited to come along with us. (Don't know yet if he can get off work.)

We leave on Tuesday morning and will get back Thursday night.

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After hearing about the Minneapolis bridge collapse on Wednesday evening, I started wondering how close we had been to that bridge during our visit in June.

The answer is: fairly close.

Remember this picture? This is from downtown Minneapolis, looking east, near the old mill area and the Mill City Museum. It shows an old stone arch bridge that used to carry trains across the Mississippi River ...


Now, look at the upper left corner of that picture. I've enlarged it here ...


The I-35W bridge is the one in front--the one with the greenish girders, not the tan-colored bridge right behind it.

I probably crossed that bridge during previous visits to the Twin Cities, but I didn't cross it during the latest trip. We drove up to downtown Minneapolis from the south and went back that way again.

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Today, it was cooler, and we were back working at my mom's house. Yes, we went back down to the basement. And guess what? We nearly finished the work down there. Hallelujah!

The rest of the basement didn't come close on the yuckiness scale to the old food cans we had to deal with a week and a half ago. But there was plenty of dust, spiderwebs and dead ladybugs. They had gotten under the vinyl cover of the pool table (not used in years). Sigh!

We came across more bags and boxes of books and magazines saved on the floor. You can imagine how musty those were. Lots of dust. Lots of sweeping. We found old Christmas decorations, some of which were too musty to recycle. We came across old tables. We found three worn tires. We dealt with old, empty boxes of kitty litter. Once again, we were asking each other, "Why did she keep this???"

My favorite was a bag of Kwik-Crete. You know; the stuff that you mix with water to make a concrete-like substance. It was a 60-pound bag, with about 45 or 50 pounds left. Due to the humidity, it had formed a solid mass. One more heavy thing to lug up the basement steps.

Plenty of other stuff was lugged upstairs, too. But now the basement is, I think, about 95 to 98% done, and the rest is just miscellaneous stuff.

It was tiring work, and the basement was plenty humid. But we got a lot done. We celebrated by having dinner at the new Arby's restaurant in Iron Mountain. My wife just loves the roast beef sandwiches at Arby's, and there hadn't been any in our area until this one opened a week or two ago.

We have been working very hard at the house. We deserve a break. And now we're getting it. With the vacation, we won't be back there for over a week. This Saturday, we start ending our social isolation--I'm taking my wife to a quilt show in northern Wisconsin, about 50 miles away. (Camera in tow, of course.)