The new gig.

I started at the new place in San Francisco last week... so far, so good. There's quite a lot of travel, especially at first; the family is all back in Chicago so I'm doing a fair amount of 1,800-mile commuting via American Airlines. Everyone's moving the last week in August, so it won't be for long.

Much electronic ink has been spilled over the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Fortunately, to the best of my knowledge, no one I know was on the bridge or around it when it happened. It's kind of disconcerting to see the bridge in the river, knowing that I have been over that thing probably 500 times in my life. I was in San Francisco when it happened, driving out to our new house in Oakley, and they broke into the radio newscast to announce that it'd happened.

This week, I'm in New York City. We stay in downtown, not far from Ground Zero, because the bank's offices are on Wall Street. One of the ways to coming into Manhattan from LaGuardia Airport is via the FDR Drive.. of course, Manhattan is an island, and how do you get onto islands? Bridges. The FDR runs along the eastern shore of Manhattan and not only did we pass over a bridge to get to the FDR, it runs under every bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn/Queens from 113th Street south. Check the google map -- there are probably 20 of them, all told.

Not to mention that every time I've been to NYC -- and this time is certainly not excluded -- all of the bridges seem to be under some kind of repair.

No one seems to know what happened in Minneapolis.. whether it was the repair, whether it was as stress cracks, the deicing system installed several years ago, whatever; but it makes you think. I'd always been a "no-fear" bridge guy -- I did the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Walk, even -- but I thought twice passing under all of the bridges on the FDR.

Of course, chances are the guy driving the black car was going to kill me long before any crappy NYC bridge fell on my head... but there it is.