I'm moving to St. Paul

Yes, that's right! 

I'm jumping ship, abandoning my post, packing my bags and several other clichés besides and setting up shop in St. Paul after living in Minneapolis for more than ten years. This is likely to be the last post I will have written west of the Mississippi (I generally leave my laptop at home).

Doubtless many so-called "conservatives" and even some moderates, unduly influenced by latter-day media punditry, would love to point to this as further evidence of the ostensible decline of the city I'm leaving, and would assume that my move was in some way motivated by factors such as "concern about crime", increasing "lawlessness", or "unrest" as it supposedly relates to ongoing well-publicized (and more than a little overblown) issues that every metropolitan area in the United States has been contending with since at least the start of the pandemic, if not the middle of the last century. 

But unfortunately for them, none of those things happen to have anything to do with my decision to leave Minneapolis.

As it turns out, the main reason I'm moving is simply that I found a better apartment with slightly more space (the one I've been living in for the past year or so is tiny and cramped) and with a floor arrangement much better suited to someone with a small music studio. Additionally, unlike my current building, with its paper-thin walls, proximity to a major thoroughfare and relatively small number of units, the new building I'm moving to promises to be much quieter during the daytime and evening hours, entailing a substantial improvement over the sudden and distracting booming noises that often accompany anyone just entering or leaving the premises. Let's face it, if you're a home studio musician and almost everyone around you routinely makes more noise than you do while you're trying to work, this is a serious problem.

So I'm really looking forward to not being constantly and unavoidably informed of the comings and goings of absolutely everyone who lives in my building at all times, and having a view that incorporates trees and a skyline (!) instead of overlooking a parking lot and some random people's backyards. And I'm eagerly anticipating being able to walk across my living room without tripping over any cable runs. I think it's going to work out just fine, and I can't wait to resume work on my projects once I'm all settled in! There may be a slight gap in my updating of this blog as a result of this process, but probably not a very long one. I've a great deal more to write about, should I be so lucky to get around to everything...