Visiting Lincoln

Started: 2023-10-30 20:47:49

Submitted: 2023-11-05 21:44:28

Visibility: World-readable

A weekend trip to Lincoln Nebraska

This summer my brother Willy took a job teaching history at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska. He and his wife Vero had a baby at the beginning of July (my second nibbling overall), and then they moved two time zones to the east. (We drove to Angwin for a hot summer weekend in the middle of July to help them pack their house before the movers showed up to load the truck.)

This fall, once they'd had a few months to try to settle into their new house (in a new state with a new time zone and a new job and a new baby) I decided to visit Willy and his family; and then my sister Bethany decided to come along, because Lincoln is approximately in the middle of the country about half-way between our coastal cities.

The only way to get to Lincoln that didn't involve a layover in Denver was to catch the one direct flight from San Francisco to Omaha, which leaves SFO in early evening (Pacific time) and lands in Omaha just before midnight (Central time), and then drive an hour from Omaha to Lincoln. This approach had some disadvantages, but it's hard to beat the convenience of a direct flight, especially when I didn't have to spend all day getting there. (I took this flight once before, in 2017, to visit the Google data center across the river in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Six years ago the flight was operated 76-seat EMB 175 regional jet; now the passenger capacity has doubled to a 150-seat mainline A320.)

Thursday, 28th September

I drove to SFO on Thursday afternoon, the 28th of September. Rather than paying for airport parking, I paid for overnight BART parking at San Bruno, then took the train to the airport, which turned out to be much cheaper than long-term airport shuttle parking, and almost as convenient, with a five-minute train ride to the airport with six trains per hour. (BART seems to have made a monkey-paw wish to handle parking at its suburban stations, and ended up with more capacity than they need now that fewer tech workers are taking the train to their office jobs in SoMa.)

At the airport I spotted a selection of San Francisco board books, and selected one book as a gift for my new niece, as an attempt at spreading pro-San Francisco propaganda even while I'm not there. (It'll be a while before she understands books, but it'll be ready when she can.)

My flight left SFO on time and took off into the evening twilight. I positioned myself on the left side of the plane so I could see the fog drifting over San Francisco as the sun set in the west.

We landed in Omaha a few minutes early, relieving me of any potential anxiety about the flight being delayed and the rental car counter closing at 01:00 before I could pick up my car. I met Bethany at the airport, waiting just outside security, and we picked up the rental car (in a section of the parking garage, just across from the terminal, that was new since the last time I visited Omaha six years ago) and drove across Omaha and through the plains to reach Lincoln. We found Willy's house, a cute one-story house built in 1925, and went to bed at 01:00, Central time.

Friday, 29th September

Willy's new job is teaching history at Union College, the school where I attended for my first two years of undergrad starting 25 years ago in the fall of 1998. ("A quarter century," one might say, "It makes you think.") This gave me the opportunity to ask Willy for a tour of campus, highlighting all of the changes in the last 25 years. The biggest change was that Jorgensen Hall, the math and science building on the edge of campus right in front of the freshman men's dorm, had been torn down, replaced by a new science building on the other side of campus. I took most of my classes there for two years: engineering, calculus, linear algebra, chemistry, and physics. I'd like to believe that my chemistry professor, Dr. Friedline, who stalked the labs threatening to burn any lab notes that weren't being taken in a proper lab notebook, finally made good on his threat and burned the whole building down.

My freshman dorm, Culver Hall, was still there, and I spotted my old dorm room, right above the exterior light that attracted bugs into my room at the end of the summer. The cafeteria on the ground floor had been completely renovated and was unrecognizable, and there was a new entrance on the north side of the building that replaced the older (inaccessible) front steps. (I saw the rebuilt entry on my last visit to campus, probably 10 or 15 years ago, but I think they had renovated it again since then.)

The most distinctive feature, in the middle of campus, is the large natural steel clocktower, immediately in front of the administration building.

I attended Union College for two years, experiencing the full breadth of seasons (fully appreciating that Lincoln has a humid continental climate with a hot humid summers and frigid winters), but most of my contemporaneous pictures of campus come from an evening I went walking around campus. In my pictures spring has not yet come to campus; the bare trees provide a clear view of the buildings beyond. When I walked around campus on this trip, on a hot end-of-summer long weekend, the trees filled in the space behind the clocktower, obscuring my view of the administration building.

The administration building itself is a triumph of Brutalist architecture, in the middle of a campus dominated by mid-rise brick-faced buildings. This was the building where I had the other half of my classes, mostly general studies plus computer science. Every day for class I'd climb up the broad front steps and look up at the towering concrete wall in front of me, with high narrow windows running tall vertical columns for four stories. Like most Adventist colleges, Union College built an administration building when it was founded; and like most colleges the building was showing its age and needed to be replaced with a more modern structure. At Union, they went bold in the design and construction, and I like it.

We dropped by the new science building, which was adequately grand, but didn't quite seem to have the scrappy soul of Jorgensen Hall. We spent more time in the library, where there was a Lego model of the Volkswagen minibus used by the marketing team.

The library had a complete set of yearbooks dating back a hundred years, including the two years I attended, split across the decade (because the first yearbook was dated 1999, and the second year was 2000). I found myself in the yearbook from my freshman year, and Bethany and Willy amused themselves looking up people they knew from Colorado, even though none of them actually attended Union themselves.

Willy took us to his office, on the fourth floor of the administration building. The stairwells still had the weird shag carpet mounted on the wall half-way up each flight, where one could leave handprints by carefully changing the alignment of the fibers. Willy's office had one narrow window looking towards the back of the building, and was packed with books, many of which I recognized. I tried to remember any of my professors' offices, which must have looked like this.

Willy bid us farewell to prepare for his afternoon classes. On my way out of the administration building I stuck my head in the microlab on the third floor. (Here "micro" means "microcomputer", a label that was a charming anachronism when I attended twenty-five years ago.) The layout was exactly the same as I remembered: two rooms in an L shape on the corner of the building, lined with tables filled with personal computers running Windows. The computers had been upgraded (and the CRT monitors had been replaced by LCD monitors), but otherwise it was identical. I could believe that the desk sitting in the corner where the microlab student attendant sat was the same that I staffed as a freshman.

Bethany and I dropped by Mill Coffee across the street, and I tried to remember if it had been here when I was here for college. (I think it might have been, but I wasn't nearly as interested with coffee and coffee shops then as I am now, so didn't spend any time there.)

We dropped by Taco Inn to pick up lunch, then drove back to Willy's house to bring lunch for Vero (who was at that moment napping with the baby so we left the burrito in the dining room for when she woke up). I do remember Taco Inn; it was right across the street from campus and was my backup fast-food meal plan when I missed the cafeteria or wanted to get a change of scenery. The dining room looked identical as the last time I was here. (At least the "smoking section" in the back half of the dining room had been made non-smoking, one of the few concessions to modernity.)

Saturday, 30th September

On Saturday morning I met Yanthor and Anya at a coffee shop somewhere in south-eastern Lincoln for breakfast. (I couldn't remember if this part of Lincoln had existed twenty-five years ago. I don't think I remember ever going there; but I was mostly limited to wherever I could go by bike from campus unless I could get a ride from someone.) This particular coffee shop also sold elaborately-produced waffles for breakfast; I had a waffle with Nutella and strawberries (and a scoop of ice cream in the middle). I haven't seen Yanthor and Anya in person for a long time (six years) and it was good to have the opportunity to catch up.

In the evening, once the day had cooled down a bit, we went down the street to Antelope Park for a mid-autumn festival, inspired by the Chinese harvest festival. The bandshell in the middle of the park featured a series of performances by different groups, mostly representing various Asian cultures but also with a handful of Native groups mixed in. Around the audience were stands set up representing various groups and selling food — including a shaved ice truck, where we got a cool dessert to balance out the unseasonably warm heat. (By this time in the evening the temperature had cooled down a bit, but in the middle of the day the temperature hit 95°F.)

After the mid-autumn festival Bethany and I headed to the nearest grocery store for popcorn and fruit for a light supper. Willy popped the popcorn in his air popper, then he got out a puzzle depicting Union College for us to assemble, which he picked up at new faculty orientation earlier this year. This picture features the new science building in the foreground; the other buildings on campus are just as I remember them from twenty-five years ago.

Saturday was also the day that the the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for an additional forty-five days, meaning that people working to support my flight back home on Monday (the TSA screeners and the air traffic controllers) would actually be getting paid for their jobs.

Sunday, 1st October

On Sunday morning I nipped out to Mill Coffee, a half-hour's walk away on the outskirts of downtown Lincoln. On the way there I passed a bunch of old brick buildings in various stages of decay and repair and reuse; this was another place where old masonry structures are still standing because they don't get knocked down by earthquakes every 90 years, and also a place where there's enough land to go around so there's less pressure to redevelop old sites. This left an interesting patchwork of older buildings that's noticeably different than what I'm used to seeing in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area.

Along the way I saw a sculpture depicting a giant hand holding a light bulb, perched on the edge of a parking lot on the edge of downtown Lincoln.

Sunday was Vero's birthday; we celebrated by bringing presents for our hosts. (Willy and Vero's birthdays are conveniently close together.) For Vero I found an easy-to-use single-serving coffee machine with a reusable filter, half-way between a pod coffee machine and a drip coffee machine.

I also gave Willy and Vero my copy of the book Fair Play, with a bit of a warning label. My pithy review is, "This book saved my marriage! Three stars"; that's too much to unpack here so instead I'll refer you to my detailed review of Fair Play.

We went out to The Olive Garden to eat for Vero's birthday dinner, then dropped by Trader Joe's to pick up a selection of easy-to-prepare meals to stock in Willy's freezer and pantry. (In my household we regularly eat Trader Joe's fried rice with vegetable dumplings on the side; but Julian often peels the dumplings to eat the skin and discard the contents.) We picked up a selection of non-dairy frozen desserts to eat at home, wrapping up Vero's birthday celebration.

Monday, 2nd October

My best choice for getting back home was an 08:00 flight from Omaha on Monday morning, which meant I had to get up well before dawn to drive the hour to the airport. Bethany's flight for New York left even earlier, at 07:20, so we had to get up well before dawn to make it to the airport in time for her flight. I dropped her off at the curb in front of the terminal, then found the nearest gas station, on the far end of a little two-lane road with a 25 mph speed limit. I came over a small rise I saw a tiny ghostly glare in the middle of the lane ahead of me. As I got closer it resolved to a raccoon, its eyes reflecting my headlights back to me. I slowed and it stood up on its rear legs and looked at me and then went back to licking whatever it had found in the middle of the road. There was no other traffic so I passed it in the opposite lane.

In this part of Omaha I guess raccoons have the right-of-way.

On my flight back to San Francisco I spent a few hours working, reading my e-mail and working on documentation for a library I've been working on. The sun was up by the time we took off, but it was still early in the morning Pacific time. We landed in San Francisco early enough that I could drive home and still claim a whole day of work, after a quick long weekend trip to Lincoln.

While I was flying to Omaha on Thursday night, longtime California senator Dianne Feinstein died; and by the time I returned home on Monday the governor had appointed a replacement. (He followed the letter of his promise to "appoint a Black woman" but still managed to piss off progressives because he didn't appoint the right Black woman; instead he appointed someone who wasn't already running for the senate so he didn't tilt the balance of the race too much.)