Visiting Lincoln

Started: 2025-01-06 16:26:12

Submitted: 2025-01-10 22:49:04

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A quick weekend trip to Lincoln, Nebraska

At the beginning of November I went to visit my brother Willy, his wife Vero, and my niece Harriet at their house in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Since the last time I visited Nebraska, United has refactored its once-daily A320 mainline jet service from SFO to Omaha into two flights on E175 regional jets, maintaining the same number of seats per day but splitting them into two flights. One of the flights retained the awkward end-of-day arrival for the outbound flight and the first-thing-in-the-morning departure for the return flight, but the other flight was scheduled at a more-reasonable time. I cashed in frequent-flier miles and booked a morning departure from San Francisco on Friday, 8th November.

My flight took me over Colorado, where the air was bumpy enough to disrupt my plan to work on the plane. The entire state was covered by clouds dumping snow on the Front Range, disrupting flights at the airport. One of the passengers in the back of the plane where I was sitting had been booked to fly from Los Angeles to Denver to Lincoln, but his flights in Denver had been canceled and he had been rebooked to fly from Los Angeles to SFO to Omaha, then get a ride back to Lincoln. The cabin crew were scheduled to dead-head home to Denver on the next flight, but they were worried their flight would also be canceled and they would be stuck in Omaha until the weather cleared.

Also new since the last time I flew to Omaha was construction at the airport. The main drive in front of the terminal was being rebuilt with a large canopy to protect it from weather, and there was additional construction on the tarmac on the airside of the terminal, but it wasn't immediately obvious what it was going to be.

Before driving to Lincoln I got a snack at Scooter's coffee near the airport in Omaha, in a parking lot still displaying a Harris/Walz campaign sign (and a sign for the independent senate candidate in Nebraska), a couple of days after the fall election.

My niece Harriet is now sixteen months old and likes having books read to her (she will pick up a book and grunt, which means she wants it read). Many of her books previously belonged to my kids; I can still recite Sheep in a Jeep from memory (on a hill that's steep! Uh-oh, the jeep won't go). Harriet also has books in Spanish (which I attempted to read phonetically, with dubious results) and French (which I refused to read). Harriet's favorite game is to pick up toys and hand them to the nearest adult, grunt, wait for the adult to take the toy, then pick up another toy. I stacked the toys on my legs and the couch next to me, and then when I ran out of space Harriet would decide to move the toys to a new location and the game would begin again.

At Willy's house I found a saguaro cactus pillow, which is the only safe way to hug a cactus.

On Saturday morning, while Vero attended church, Willy drove Harriet and me around Lincoln, starting at Pioneers Park. I knew about this park from my time as an undergrad student in Lincoln (a quarter-century ago), but it was far enough out from campus that I couldn't easily visit it. The most interesting feature of the park were columns from the original treasury building in Washington, DC that had been recovered when the building was rebuilt and moved to Lincoln at the behest of a local politician. They are now set up overlooking a pond, configured to look like they're a ruin of a classical temple rather than a neoclassical government building.

On Saturday afternoon Willy and I went to the Nebraska state capitol. This is one of the few state capitol buildings that isn't built as a replica of the US capitol. On Saturday all of the offices are closed but the building is open to wander around, and when I was an undergraduate visiting the capitol was a popular thing to do on Saturday afternoon.

It's probably been twenty-five years since I set foot in the building, but every time I come to Lincoln it's visible in the distance, with the statue of the sower perched on the top keeping watch of the city and its surroundings.

We walked the grand halls, looked in the (locked) glass doors to the unicameral legislative chamber, and looked for an elevator to take us to the dome at the top of the tower in the middle of the building. The capitol building was in the middle of some construction or restoration work, and the first several elevators we tried were all set up as construction elevators, with padding on the walls and floors to prevent them from damage as equipment and supplies and debris were hauled in and out. We were hoping for an unencumbered elevator but finally took one upwards, emerging on the top floor into a dimly-lit several-story-tall rotunda under the dome at the top of the tower, surrounded by dark marble on the walls and murals depicting the history of the state.

On our way back down we found the last elevator with its wood paneling visible, so I grabbed a selfie on our descent before we arrived on the first floor.

The capitol building closed at 17:00, and we stepped outside onto the walkway circling the building a few minutes before then and discovered that the sun was finally peeking out under the clouds, after hiding behind the clouds all day. This was the most-golden minute of the golden hour; the light cast long shadows in the brightly-colored light of the setting sun on the side of the building.

Our project on Sunday was to install a handrail on the stairs leading into the basement. The house is about a hundred years old but the basement looks like it was finished by a previous homeowner with more enthusiasm than practical building skills. I found a guide telling me how to install a stair railing and we took measurements and took a trip to Menard's to get an unfinished oak rail, plus mounting brackets and stain and a hand miter saw and various other things. The hand miter saw proved useful when we got to the parking lot and confirmed that the full length of the stair rail wouldn't fit in the car; but we didn't need sixteen feet of stair rail so we cut it (by hand) to a more-manageable size (which still barely fit in the car).

Installing the stair rail was relatively straightforward, if not precisely easy. We got a new stud finder which proved much more reliable than the old tired stud finder I have at home, which made it easier to locate where the mounting brackets were supposed to go. Then we confirmed the length of rail we needed and used the miter box to cut the rail at the precise length. Installing all of the mounting brackets was long and tedious (I didn't totally trust the wall so I wanted as many brackets as possible, which meant more work), and then we held the stair rail in position and screwed it into place on the brackets. The last step was to stain and finish the rail, which we chose to do in place rather than in advance so we didn't have to worry about picking up a not-quite-dry stair rail and trying to install it (but the trade-off is that the back facing the wall didn't really get painted, but it's impossible to see that side so maybe it doesn't matter).

On Monday I drove back to Omaha for an early afternoon flight to San Francisco (once again taking advantage of the new mid-day schedule). I worked on the plane, finding a clever solution to a problem I'd been working on. While I was flying over Utah I noticed out my window a Southwest 737 a few thousand feet below me traveling in roughly the same direction but sliding northward towards Salt Lake City. (I took a picture but the plane is barely visible at high resolution.)

It was good to be able to spend a weekend visiting my brother and his family in Lincoln, and I intend to take the opportunity to do so again.