My sister asked what I wanted for Christmas… My Amazon wish list is a pretty good start — it goes back quite a ways, but it’s all valid.

Going backwards from there, it’s been a while… Let’s see. Back in October (?) Lola and I ran up to Minneapolis to see some old friends of hers get hitched up. It was the last really warm weekend of the year, sunny and 70. We stopped in Red Wing (yes, that’s where Red Wing boots come from) on way up, enjoyed the fall colors along the upper Mississippi…

…arrived in MSP, checked into the Holiday Inn (great view of the parking deck, ugh), and went out for a drink or two with some cute tattooed girls. On Saturday, we drove had breakfast in some hipster zone and then drove around looking at the Ghetto in the Sky until it was time to go to the wedding.

We showed up late, Bill got drunk, and before you know it we were having vegan coffee in Disneyland (Milwaukee Ave)!

Stopped in La Crosse on the way home and had a beer at The Casino. I told a Bush joke — “somewhere in Texas, a village is missing it’s idiot” — to the owner, he laughed.

Since then…. I’ve been out to Milwuakee a couple of times, first for the regional APA conference, and then to catch up with Brett & Lindsay. John Norquist, outgoing mayor of Milwaukee and now President of the Congress for the New Urbanism spoke for a quite a while at the conference - very impressive. The Director of Planning for the city, Peter Park did a talk about recent development there, and their focus on quality urban design. Excellent stuff. A week or so later I was in Chicago for a 3 day field trip with our “Central City Planning” course. I’ve posted a bunch of photos in this gallery.

Now I’m focused on wrapping up the semester and figuring out what I want to come out of this program with. Now that I understand more about what planners do, I’ve pretty much realized that I don’t want to be one. Too political for one, and more importantly I don’t entirely agree with the direction that much of planning seems to going in. The new role of the planner seems to be to channel as much of the public as possible, and then convince them to accept the second-lowest common denominator. As expressed by Dan Marks, planning director for Berkeley in this month’s Planning magazine: “Our role is to express the vision of the community, and to tell the community how to implement that vision.” Bah. The public doesn’t know what’s good for them. I think it’s far more interesting to go do things, instead of trying to figure out what the public wants. I’m thinking that I’ll end up in what might be called progressive development — check out The Rose Network for an example.

Parting shots: If you haven’t already, go see Lost in Translation. Brilliant. Beautiful, I thought. I threw another party last weekend, but I can’t show you the pictures. Let’s just say it ended with a pre-dawn session of spin the bottle. Very amusing. There was a nice fog the other morning:

I bought some vitamins today — do they work?