Lincolnite

It's a busy busy time of year at 625 Elm Street. Here are some miscellaneous updates: The Missus makes excellent desserts throughout the year, but the holidays are especially fruitful for the sugar queen. I swear, one of these days she is going to have to open her own shop. I'm not just saying that; she would love to bake for a living, and, though I'm not an unbiased observer, I have to think her odds of success are pretty darn high. For example, one of her desserts earned the name FGBs after a friend exclaimed "These are [darn] good brownies!" upon eating one for the first time. Robbie is at an adorable age right now. He will be seven months old on Saturday. He is sitting up very well, but his real favorite activities are standing and walking. (Yes, walking!) Give him a finger from each hand to hold onto, and he's happy as a clam as he meanders around the room. He is on the verge of a crawling breakthrough, so we need to go on a childproofing overhaul. This week we will hit an important milestone with Robbie: he will have been with us for six months. That means that our adoption agency can give the appropriate paperwork to our attorney, who can then file with the courts for finalization. We hope to get a court date in late January. In other baby-related news, I just received an e-mail from my sister. She is going to go to the hospital on Thursday to have her water broken. My nephew Sam (after his great grandfather) should be here by Thursday night.

Lincoln Police are investigating a series of attempted sexual assaults and a few similar incidents while trying to discover if one or more potential sex criminals is on the loose. If you or somebody you know sees anything resembling the pattern of incidents the police are looking at, try to observe as much as you can about the individual and call police. On a related topic, note that the offenses (and potential offenses) illustrate nicely how sex offender zoning restrictions are not likely to deter sex crimes to any substantial degree. First and foremost, there is no evidence that the perpetrator(s) live anywhere near the locations of the incidents. Second, as Police Chief Tom Casady said, sex assaults by strangers "are very, very rare". Most sex assaults are committed by persons known to the victims. I wish a solution to the problem were as simple as boxing sex offenders into a corner; unfortunately, reality shows that will do little more than give us a false sense of security.

Lincoln's Near South neighborhood has been a frequent target of small revitalization and preservation efforts for years. Now that the City is conducting a blight study of the historic neighborhood, maybe it will get the TLC it deserves. My one concern, as I have expressed several times before, is the amount of area being declared blighted across Lincoln (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for questionable reasons). How much energy can the City put into any of the blighted areas if so many areas are declared blighted? Or phrased another way, are we better off doing as we're doing now, and trying to offer incentives for redevelopment in a bunch of areas all at once? Or should we focus our efforts on only a couple areas at a time?

First night of finals week at UNL.

Lincoln may or may not be a difficult place to do business. But if you want to know why some people say Lincoln can be a bit of a pain in the rump, Mayor Seng's call today for a "do-over" in the Verizon RFP is one example:

Mayor Coleen Seng said Monday she will throw out the "request for proposals" the city issued for a 100,000-square-foot office building that turned out to be for Verizon Wireless. In a move reminiscent of the RFP process when the city purchased seven new firetrucks, Seng has concluded the bidding process should begin anew.

::sigh::

I sure hope the fact that the bus drove right by me without stopping this morning isn't a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the day. If I would have had a raw egg, I would have chucked it at the side of the bus as it drove by. Grrrr.

Please tell me you caught the Husker volleyball team's thrilling come-from-behind victory on Saturday. Please tell me you didn't miss one of the greatest matches in Husker volleyball history. Please tell me you were with a large group of Husker fans, perhaps at a local bar, cheering and clapping and high-fiving as the team orchestrated a near-miraculous comeback. The path to the National Championship in Omaha won't be easy with three very talented Pac-10 schools standing in the way. But man, after a match like Saturday's, it's hard not to feel like the Huskers have a few friends in the pantheon of volleyball gods. Go Big Red! Oh yeah, anybody have any tickets they would like to part with?

Want RSS from the Journal Star? Bernie will teach you how you can get it. Thanks, Bernie! By the way, no word yet on if our letter will be published in the letters to the editor.

Cindy Lange-Kubick wants to know what you would do with $20 you came upon by chance. Here are five things I might do around Lincoln with 20 bucks:

1. Leave an especially large tip for one of my favorite waiters.
2. Buy a gift for a child from a giving tree.
3. Buy rides for kids on the carousel at Gateway or the train at the zoo.
4. Pay bus fares for anybody who needed it.
5. Buy cookies from The Cookie Company and hand them out to passers-by.

Poor Robert. The kid tries to be cute and bubbly and happy, but it sure is tough when you have a nose infection. (Not a sinus infection, according to the doc.) He is all plugged up, and his drainage causes a terrible sounding cough, the kind that makes you wince in empathy. He can't sleep very well when lying flat, so I have spent portions of a few nights this week sleeping with him and propping him up. Last night he made it through most of the night in his swing. I celebrated not having to get up by sleeping terribly and having bizarre dreams. I hope his weekend goes better for him. The weather is supposed to be nice, so maybe getting outside for a walk or two will help. He has had a cold or illness of some sort for several weeks in a row. I know that's relatively normal for a baby's first winter, but it sure would be nice to give him a couple days of perfect health here and there.

Neal thanks a couple City Council members:

I don't really care whether they rename a couple Lincoln streets after Rosa Parks or Bertram Goodhue. Parks and Goodhue are both fine people to commemorate. The case for Goodhue is particularly strong. But I wonder: Are these two proposals the start of a larger trend of renaming streets in Lincoln? I sure hope not. There's the confusion factor, of course, as well as the problem of the resources required to change a street's name. But my larger fear is that if the trend continues, everybody is going to want their token street. Once that starts, the quality of debate always goes downhill quickly. There's really only one way to find out if a trend has begun, and that's to wait around and see what happens over the next few months. On the other hand, as long as we're throwing out proposals, here's mine. (I'm such a troublemaker.) I think we should rename Highway 2 (a.k.a. Nebraska Highway) Bison bison Street, in honor of one of the species our ancestors (im)politely asked to move out of the way so that we could occupy this state. It's only fair.

Neal Obermeyer has been so kind as to periodically allow me to post some of his work here on Lincolnite. Believe it or not, not every one of Neal's ideas goes over well with the folks at the Journal Star for one reason or another. It's a crime, I know. Nevertheless, the Journal Star's loss is our gain, so I am starting a new series lovingly called Neal's Rejects. In today's sketch, Neal welcomes Verizon to Lincoln: (Click the image to enlarge)

"The major decisions are all finalized right now." That's Kris Humphrey, the project manager for the city's Harris Overpass project at last night's public meeting. The $16.5 million bridge over O Street is all but ready to begin construction. Work should begin next fall, with completion set for the following fall. I just have one question: why in the world does the project need its own website? Call me silly, but it seems like we could have saved ourselves a few hundred bucks by, I don't know, sticking it on the Public Works projects website.