Moving from Omaha to Arkansas

We spent Jan 13-22 back in Omaha to wrap up all sorts of loose ends. We hurried back to be at the big $10,000 giveaway at O'Daniel Honda. (Remember back in July when we won $2,500?) Well, we didn't win the big prize, but they did give us sandwiches.

After the non-winning event, we spent the next week frantically running around town and packing up our stuff from the house. I thought it would be pretty easy and not take that long. I wasn't exactly right. It was a lot of hard work, and having 3 little ones made it difficult to do any project for longer than an hour at a time.


But on Jan 22, we hit the road leaving all of our possessions locked up in a 16' POD. Tom pulled some amazing maneuvers getting everything into the pod. He called it a true Polish Packing Job. The final pieces were jammed behind the door as we pulled it down inch by inch, shoving things up a little higher as the door came down securing them. If everything arrives in one piece, we'll be lucky.

We're scheduled to close on our house on Feb. 25. We are so excited! We'll post more photos once it's a done deal and we've got the keys, but here's a little teaser. Our new backyard is HUGE! Zeke loves playing in it already (that's where he's spent time when we've been at the house) and I can see the entire fenced-in yard from the kitchen and living room. I predict many many hours will be spent in our backyard!

....this is different

Omaha Music: Big Al

The Big Al experience is not for everyone. But it suited me just fine. I feel lucky to have experienced Big Al a couple of weeks ago after performing at the Omaha Arts and Entertainment Showcase in Benson. Big Al is intense. He swears a lot. And he spends a surprising amount of time making sure the audience knows how hot bassist Ashley Dawn is. But he also rocks. I thought it was really fun. Really Omaha.

You can experience Big Al for yourself here. NSFW.

Omaha Music: The Mynabirds

We heard the buzz about The Mynabirds all the way from Honduras. We put them in the to-do list as soon as we got back. Last week we took the whole family on a field-trip to see the band at Lauritzen Gardens. Rain forced the concert indoors, but it was still a swell time.

The Mynabirds:



Everyone enjoyed the music. Karine and I ate fried chicken. Zeke put some stickers on his face.

Omaha + Grain Silos + Art = Stored Potential

Omaha is marketing itself these days as an oasis of whimsy in the heart of America. Omaha is actually a Sioux word that means across the current or upstream. We're just a bunch of up stream paddlers here in Omaha.

That's why projects like Stored Potential make perfect sense here. Here's the plan: Cover a colossal set of unused grain silos near downtown Omaha with art. Then serve dinner to 500 people at the base of the silos. It's happening October 3rd.


This project is so breathtakingly awesome I can't believe it's not on the front page of the Omaha World-Herald every day.

Find more info, artists renderings, and blog here.

TEDx 2010: Omaha

TED Conferences are supposed to blow your mind. These conferences are purpose-built to spread ideas that redefine for us what is possible and remind us that finding solutions to human problems is a joyous enterprise. TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conferences work as inspiration catalysts for entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, educators, policy-makers, and just plain folks. They are awesome.

And -- because all things awesome either start out, pass through, or end up in Omaha -- we're going to have our very own TEDx Conference in October. TEDx Omaha will be held October 16th, 2010 at the Durham Museum.

TED events are organized around 18 minute talks and performances by innovative artists, thinkers, and doers. The most mind-blowing talk I've ever seen is this one, delivered by Ray Kurzweil.


More on TEDx Omaha: TEDx 2010: Omaha

If you are concerned that maybe you spend too much time on the Internet, spend some time on the TED site and learn about 8 million things you didn't know about our world: TED TALKS

Omaha's Third Place: Neigbborhood Swimming Pools

Omaha is a special, special place. One of the things that makes it special to me is its network of neighborhood pools. In the District -- that's what we call our part of town -- most elementary schools have swimming pools across the street. As a kid I spent nine months of the year in school, the other three I spent at the pool across the street. The pools aren't managed by the schools; they share only a name and a parking lot. A volunteer board oversees pool finances and hires lifeguards.

Community. That's why you want to live somewhere.

What do I mean by third place? Find out: TEDx Omaha

Omaha Children's Museum

Midtown Crossing at Turner Park: Family Field Trip

The best thing about being available for immediate employment -- that's what I call it, unemployed just sounds so negative -- is that you get to spend a lot of time with your family. After doing a good bit of thinking yesterday about Omaha and urban development, I decided it was time for a little family field trip. Everyone had a blast.

Midtown Crossing at Turner Park

I feel like an octopus. I am looking for a job and that means looking for opportunity. So I have to reach out with my tentacles and probe for opportunities in Omaha. The more I understand Omaha, the better chance I have of finding an opportunity. So I am learning about Omaha.

This is Midtown Crossing at Turner Park. It is a million square-foot mixed-use development near downtown Omaha. It's something to be excited about, I think. The development was made possible, in part, by an organization called Destination Midtown, a collaboration between public, private, and neighborhood stakeholders. Awesome.

Hast Ever Been to Omaha

Hast ever been to Omaha,
Where rolls the dark Missouri down,
And four strong horses scarce can draw
An empty wagon through the town?

Where sand is blown from every mound,
To fill your eyes and ears and throat;
Where all the steamers are aground,
And all the shanties are afloat?

Where whisky-shops the livelong night
Are vending out their poison-juice;
Where men are often very tight,
And women deemed a trifle loose?

Where taverns have an anxious guest
For every corner, shelf, and crack;
With half the people going West,
And all the others going back?

Where theaters are all the run,
And bloody scalpers come to trade;
Where every thing is overdone
And every body underpaid?

If not, take heed to what I say;
You'll find it just as I have found it;
And if it lies upon your way,
For God's sake, reader, go around it!
--John Godfrey Saxe (1869)

Omaha Railroad Days

We celebrated Omaha's railroad heritage Saturday with a trip to Lauritzen Gardens, the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, and the RailsWest Railroad Museum. We had a blast. We discovered that Zeke loves trains. It's just that he calls them cars. One step at a time. He also calls airplanes boats.

Lauritzen Gardens was a charming discovery. That's what Karine says. I said, Karine, what you say about Lauritzen Gardens? A charming discovery, she says. I would say more. I would say that Lauritzen Gardens are probably the best gardens around since the hanging ones in Babylon. But I can be a bit of a hyperbolist. Especially when I'm talking about my home town.

Poetry on the Internet

Poetry on the Internet just seems like a damn weird thing to me. There is an all-star analogy to describe its weirdness. It's like, I don't know, going inside to watch baseball on a beautiful summer day. Something like that.

Andrew Sullivan posts poetry on his blog every Sunday. He's a smart fellow, but I've never read a single line of a single poem he has carefully selected and posted.

Nonetheless.

I found a very funny poem about Omaha that was published in Harper's sometime towards the end of the nineteenth century. There is some stuff in there about tight men (tight meaning drunk, I think, in the way that Hemingway used it about eighty-five times in The Sun Also Rises) and loose women. That's pretty much Omaha.

I'm not posting it here. This is just a warning.

R. Buckminster Fuller and Omaha

R. Buckminster Fuller is one of the coolest guys ever. He was an engineer, a poet, a cartographer, a yachtsman, and a thoroughly wacky futurist. He invented the geodesic dome. He has an entire family of carbon molecules named after him. Isn't that neat?


What does this man have to do with Omaha? The world's largest glazed geodesic dome is located at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska. It was not our primary reason for moving to Omaha, but it was definitely a factor in the decision.

What I learned in sewers, part one

Adolescent boys in the Midwestern United States spend a surprising amount of time hanging out in sewers. That was the word we used for it. Sewers. As in, let's go to the sewer today. I don't think that's quite the right word for it though, for the place we went. Probably not the most accurate word. We were not, for example, hanging out in sewage. We did not pass time exploring the routes through which mountains of poo were flushed away from the homes of suburban Omaha, Nebraska. That would have been gross. Lot of beef eaten in Omaha. The more accurate word for the network of corrugated head high tubes is culverts. That's the word. We hung out in culverts, but we called them sewers. Storm sewers is what my dad called him.

Anyone's parents who knew anything about anything told us to stay the hell out of the sewers, storm drains, culverts. Their parental point of view was understandable. Sewers are a natural congregation point for various unsavory types: rats, raccoons, satanists, homeless people, snakes, and perverts. Not to mention the poisonous gas. All really good things for young adults to stay away from, particularly the poisonous gas and the perverts. But we were eleven, twelve, thirteen year old boys, living unleashed, more or less, in the suburbs. Was hanging out in sewers stupid for all the reasons our parents believed it was stupid? Sure. But we lived in the suburbs. Stupidity was our weapon against the the daily humdrum that held us all in the same smothering embrace.