Bloomington, Minnesota

The zip code for Bloomington, Minnesota is 55431. You probably did not know this. I did not know it either until I began the process of trying to name this blog. 

My first inclination for this blog's name was something like, "This Is What I Saw Today", or "What I Saw Today", or "What I Read Today". I soon discovered that these are not original ideas for blog names because when you type these words into Google search you will find other blogs with these names. This just confirms again that you are not the original thinker that you thought you were.

Being forced to attain another level of creativity, I asked,"Just what is the rationale for this blog?" And the answer is simply to write a certain number of posts (55) in a certain number of days (31). And pretty quickly, I hit on the idea of '55 for 31'.

Briefly, I considered using all digits in the title, as in 55 4 31. And while that manner of naming the blog never really appealed to me, I searched to see if there was anything else like it. And there is. The zip code for Bloomington, Minnesota is A LOT like it. As in, all five digits.

Kathy and I have been to Bloomington before. We were there in '09. Bloomington is where the Mall of America sits on the site of old Metropolitan Stadium where the Twins and Vikings used to play. While on that trip we were turning around in Bloomington because we missed the exit for our hotel when a humongous airplane flew overhead at a rate of speed that looked unsustainable for an aircraft that size. It was Air Force One. The newly-minted president was visiting the Twin Cities the same weekend we were, only he wasn't driving a rented Toyota. And it seems the plane was going fast enough, after all.

That trip is forever etched in our memories, though, because I was carrying around a blood clot the size of a garter snake in my leg. It could have broke loose any time, but it didn't. I still wonder about that.