After waiting 4 months I finally received my last two pieces of furniture for the condo. I’ll disperse the pictures throughout the post for your viewing pleasure. Back in October I made the decision to hire an interior designer since I don’t know the first thing when it comes to funk-sway (I wish that was how it’s spelled). So Ammar with Dwelling Designs helped me out. I found out about Ammar through RiverWest since he did the layout of our lobby which I really liked. It worked out really well since we bartered my web services and media center installation skillz for a discount on furniture. Anyways, I ordered this furniture back in October and some of it came in a couple of weeks but the big pieces – the dining table and media cabinet had to be built in Italy and shipped over. They arrived at the beginning of December but they had some sort of damage or defects so they had to ship new ones. Those weren’t shipped out until the end of December and had the same 2 month lead time. I loved the dining table the first time I saw it so it was worth the wait. The legs are wrapped in leather and the glass is thick enough that I’ve considered jumping on it. The media cabinet was Ammar’s idea since all my open shelves of music/movies looked very ‘college-esque’ according to him. I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, but now that it’s in there the whole place looks much nicer. I just need to get some stuff on top of the cabinet and on the wall. The bedroom is next but Bri is going to do that room since I want her to have some of her own taste in here.

Yesterday afternoon I worked from home so I could be there for the furniture delivery. It amazes me that I can perform nearly all my work anywhere with my laptop. The only thing I really need to physically be in the building to do is connecting hardware in the labs or to attend meetings. When I came home yesterday I ran into Mark Wheat in the elevator. Add this to the list of weird run-ins I’ve had lately with people whom I haven’t talked to in a long time. For those of you who don’t know Mark, he was the DJ coach at Radio K before he left to be a fulltime DJ at 89.3 The Current. Turns out Mark bought a condo in my building. What a small world.

Nip/Tuck

Bri and I watched the Season 1 finale of Nip/Tuck last night. The show is really good but I think I hyped up the finale to myself after Chris said it was the best thing on Television. Sean and his wife getting back together seemed out of the blue. She seemed pretty upset about his affair, and even after learning from Christian that he was trying to protect her when sneaking out at night to do heroine-implant surgeries…it just didn’t seem in character. I like that they aren’t holding Christian down to the whole family thing. They finally gave him some responsibility but not enough to stop whoring himself out hopefully.

Looking ahead…

This weekend should be fun. Bri’s sister Tia is coming up tonight and her family is coming tomorrow night for a pre-Birthday dinner in the city. Bri’s birthday is March 1st so friends in Minneapolis are forewarned to keep that night open for some sort of dinner activity. And speaking of upcoming things, I also booked tickets to Seattle in April. I’m going out to meet up with my parents and Leah who is a longtime family friend from Germany. It will be cool to go back and see the first house I lived in. I’m also planning on doing my long-awaited Grunge tour of Seattle. Lots of things to look forward to.

This weekend was pretty low key. Friday night was spent watching the end of Arrested Development with Mark and Bri at my place. I nearly cried when they made the joke with Gob burning the bush. It’s sad to see such a good show go away since I feel that I never find out about good shows until they are either off the air or near to it. I’ll have fond memories of Paal laughing uncontrollably in Marcy Park when we first started watching it last year. Oh well, if Six Feet Under has taught me anything, Everything Ends.

The other big thing that happened this past week is that I found out more about the proposal to build a condo in front of mine. The developer still has a lot of work to go but they want to put up a 34 unit condo called “The Wave” (yes, that’s a really lame name) on the Fuji-Ya property that the Minneapolis Park board owns. They have a PDF of the design located here. The history behind this property is tragic. It was once a Japanese Sushi/Steak house that was family ran but the city took their land by imminent domain. At the time, the Park board wanted it as part of the Mill Ruins park renovation that they are doing all along the river. The city sat on the land for awhile and the historical society noticed that it had some Mill rung’s on it. Since it had these ruins, it was marked as historic and requires the Historical Preservation societies approval before anything can be built there. This ruined any plans the city had for revamping the whole property since the society would most likely want to incorporate those ruins into whatever goes up there. So fast forward to recently where the Heritage Development group proposes this condo project. The Minneapolis Park board first has to sell the land to Heritage before anything can happen. If they do decide to sell the land, the developer has to get the City, which includes the zoning and historic society, to approve the design.

At first I got really worried because I heard these new condos would be 11 stories tall. This would potentially block my awesome view of the river (that’s what the image at the top of this blog right now is). Turns out though that “The Wave” is actually shaped like…a wave. So in front of me it would only be 1 story since their is an attached 1 story restaurant. The actual condos start to the left of my unit at 3 stories or so and it slopes up to 11 at the intersection which isn’t directly in front of RiverWest. It has made me a little bit less concerned about it, but I’m sure the people to the left of me are going to be upset, as I would be.

So this all boils down to a public meeting that is being held this Wednesday (Feb 15th) by the Minneapolis Park board to decide if they should sell this land to the developer or not. I’m planning on going with the rest of RiverWest and we’ll be bringing our torches and pitchforks. I really do hope the land gets developed since it’s just a parking lot and abandoned restaurant right now. I think a 3-4 story retail/condo project would be really good for it. If nothing else the 11 stories on the far end is a bit much.

I also found out today that the furniture I ordered back in October has finally come in! It’s in North Carolina so it will take another week before I have it, but at least it got through customs. The pieces are a glass/leather dining table and a media cabinet to hold all my music/movies. I should be blogging pictures of it by next week if all goes well.