saintpaulitan
by nick and patty

Some photos from up north. That’s all I got…

Iggy has the right idea.

Sorry, folks, no commentary here. I’m tired and I just got back from a vacation. You can sort this all out for yourselves.

Just a quick note to let people know that I’ve been extremely sick since Thursday, and consequently haven’t blogged. I’m not going to be one of those bloggers who gives up after a half-dozen posts; however, I’m still sick, and because I’m also likely to be pulling a lot of late hours at work, posting might be sporadic this week. At the very least, I’ll post something on Thursday, when they’ll be rolling a pair of old Civil War-era cannons onto the Capitol Mall and firing them once every hour in honor of “Freedom Day.” (Should make for some cool pics and/or video.)

Every time someone starts a blog, it begs the obvious question: why? According to BlogPulse, there are 76,911,084 blogs out there right now on the Internet. Why pollute cyberspace further?

I have two answers, at least one of which I believe is legitimate:

The first is that my wife and I both work in communications — she as a journalist, and I as some kind of weird journalist-bureaucrat-writer thing — and we’ve both come to the realization that anyone who intends to have a successful career in our field will need at least a basic working knowledge of Web publishing and Web design. We figured that playing with a WordPress blog would at least give us some familiarity with CSS and HTML. After that, we’d like to learn some more advanced stuff — although we really haven’t a clue where to start.

The second reason has to do with an experience I had the other day walking around my neighborhood in St. Paul. Although I’ve been living on the West Side for a year and a half, until recently I’d never really taken the time to explore the area. Most of my friends still live in places like Uptown and Dinkytown (in Minneapolis), so when I go out to do stuff I usually end up spending time there. Last Friday, my wife and I took a walk around our neighborhood together, and we discovered all kinds of cool places that I had never noticed before, despite the fact that I had been driving by them every day for the last 18 months. Literally, within a few blocks of my (now our) duplex, we discovered a massive park, a bike trail, a spa, a bicycle shop, a dentist’s office, a tattoo parlor, a funeral home, a hand-made clothing shop, and a row of gigantic, really cool-looking houses overlooking the Mississippi.

It occurred to me that St. Paul is a place worth exploring, and that it might make a good subject for a blog. My wife and I talked about it, and we decided to name it saintpaulitan.

This blog will probably remain a work in progress throughout the duration of its life. We plan on tinkering with the look of the blog as a way to help us learn some coding, which means it will probably crash from time to time, and half the stuff won’t work. Be that as it may, for the few of you who will end up being regular visitors, we hope you enjoy it. See you around.

Peace.

— Nick