The first race of the season has come and gone and I’m still deciding whether or not to put my Winter boots away. Anyway, Nat put his boots away, shaved his legs (what?! I know!!) and brought honor to his family.

His advancement to a category 3 racer means that he has more of an opportunity to blow out his lungs and have a heart attack. Or be smeared on the pavement at a higher speed.

I’m not sure how these Vitals for the 2011 Opus Criterium Series were obtained – but here they are:

High Speed: 38.2

Average Speed: 25.9

Distance: 17.06

Time:39:34

Heart Rate Average: 156

Max Heart Rate: 169

And here’s a little propaganda:

For some people, the morning commute includes a drum of coffee, talk radio, and a seat belt.

Not nat.

Winter in Minnesota is considered purgatory by most scholars. Six (plus) months of penance per year seems about right for the sins of the other seasons. Nat spends the Winter punishing himself on his stationary bicycle – hour after hour in his damp, cold cellar (I just threw those adjectives in – I’m sure his Edina basement is neither damp nor cold) pedaling his little heart out. Before Summer, he must spin the wheel of the stationary bicycle a lot. 5,000 miles – to be exact. I did some complicated geographical calculations and figured out that if Nat pedaled in the real world, he could get to Argentina.

Sometimes (in this case) words can’t adequately describe a (torturous) moment in time. But that’s where video comes in. This video will give you a small taste of the race that Nat (and the rest of the Tanek-sponsored-Flanders-Bicycle-Team) is training for:

I love suburban shopping centers. I do! Drop me anywhere in the country and I know I can have my ears pierced, eat a cinnabon, try out a massage chair, buy a cell phone, get my hair cut, rent a wedding dress and now - at Burnsville Marketplace – pick up a bottle of wine. I might actually live in my car in the mall parking lot.

Tanek (and Burnsville Marketplace owner, Tom Ehrlich) presented a new remodel project to the city council and it was met with thunderous applause and tears of joy. The project includes a new tenant and facade concept for Haskell’s (where I will be picking up my bottle of wine).

Here are some before and after renderings of the new project:

Drew Wood delves into the origin of Touchpoint Retail. I love that he used the term brainchild. I’d like to have a brainchild someday.

The Science Unseen

… Based in Minneapolis, Touchpoint is the brainchild of two architects and a branding guy—Nat Shea and Ken Piper, principals and founders of Minneapolis-based architecture and design firm Tanek, and Josh Hanson, formerly with Best Buy among other retail giants—who saw a major hole in the retail marketplace.  “Repeatedly over our careers as architects we’ve run into instances where we’re working with a client, and we’re solving the architectural puzzle, and it’s a beautiful space; and then their marketing group shows up and they start putting stuff up, and then our store environment might not even look like what their campaign is, or what their vision is because they’re approaching it from two separate entities,” says Shea of the disconnect he perceived from his perch atop Tanek.  Piper adds, “I think somehow it was the excitement of being called in on a job, coming in to do it and finding out all the pieces weren’t aligning, but we were the only ones who knew that.”  As architects, Shea and Piper felt as though they were often coming in too late in the process, which marginalized and compartmentalized their efforts. They knew that for a retail space or restaurant to properly materialize, all the parts of the store—from concept to design to build-out to branding—needed to mesh on the same organic level.  “I think we’ve changed that model by saying the architecture component is one subset of what Touchpoint does and now it’s a matter of looking at that project as a whole and understanding and designing it from that perspective,” says Shea.

Read the rest of the article here: