There are some apartments at the corner of Wessyngton and North Highland that have been the focus of some neighborhood controversy. My understanding is that the owner has been trying to sell the property for new house construction, but wanted permission for three houses to be built there instead of only two. Given that any new houses built will almost certainly be Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAHs), this is not a prospect about which I am enthusiastic. I don't know many of the people who live in the apartments, but the ones I do know are great neighbors and I would miss them if they moved.
Tom and I were discussing this the other evening when we were out walking the dog. He said that the owner had finally gotten permission to have the apartments replaced with three houses instead of two. I said I hoped that didn't happen, and given the current housing market, if the owner had paying tenants, he might be better off hanging on to the apartments. There are two LHADAHs on the street already - one of which has been on the market for months, and the other still under construction - and that seems to me like it might be enough.
Several years ago Trees Atlanta had a Saturday tree planting event in Morningside. The Trees Atlanta planted elms along the curb on the Wessyngton Road side of the apartments, and crepe myrtles along the North Highland side. One of the elms got dug up by a dog the following summer. We replanted it and ferried some gallon jugs of water to the end of street but to no avail. At least one of the crepe myrtles has been taken out by a northbound car that missed the curve on Highland.
For at least the last two years, the elm trees - which were drastically pruned a couple of years ago, and are still not very tall - have provided seasonal residence for birds. There have been birds' nests in two of them, which amazes me. In spite of drought and ongoing tree removal (thank you, City of Atlanta) our neighborhood is still home to wonderful, massive, towering oak trees. Surely there are safer and more secure places to raise a family than in these trees that are not much taller than I am, planted between sidewalk and curb, where meddlesome humans could peer right into one's nest! Perhaps these particular birds are of scared of heights, or paralyzed by fear that their offspring will take a tumble out of the nest. It seems inexplicable to me.
Then over the weekend - probably during one of our several trips back and forth to the movie store - I noticed that there also was a bird's nest in the crepe myrtles. It was meticulously constructed of pine straw (and by an animal that not only doesn't have opposable thumbs, but doesn't have hands). What a marvel.
If we end up with three more LHADAHs on our street, will they leave the little elm trees and the crepe myrtles in place, or will they remove them?
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Signs of the Times
I went to the movie store this afternoon and noticed that the furniture was from the florist next door was getting loaded up in a U-Haul truck. I didn't see a sign ("Visit us at our new location," for example) that would provide any explanation. But no explanation was needed.
Times are tough. If the budget has to be cut, flowers would be one of the first things to go.
Yesterday the girls and I went to Target (two Targets, actually) to buy items for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes (due at Haygood tomorrow) and gifts for the child whose wish list we got from Haygood's Angel Tree. It was not particularly crowded. I had been a little concerned about trying to do any shopping at all, because I thought the stores might be crowded, but they weren't.
On Long Island yesterday, a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a crowd that broke down the doors of a store.
The house on North Highland with the damaged retaining wall is now being sold by Southern REO, a real estate agency that specializes in foreclosures.
Times are tough. If the budget has to be cut, flowers would be one of the first things to go.
Yesterday the girls and I went to Target (two Targets, actually) to buy items for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes (due at Haygood tomorrow) and gifts for the child whose wish list we got from Haygood's Angel Tree. It was not particularly crowded. I had been a little concerned about trying to do any shopping at all, because I thought the stores might be crowded, but they weren't.
On Long Island yesterday, a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a crowd that broke down the doors of a store.
The house on North Highland with the damaged retaining wall is now being sold by Southern REO, a real estate agency that specializes in foreclosures.
The Horse
Our friend Carol gave it to Caroline when she was very small. It had a smooth blue plastic body, rugged orange wheels, and blue plastic handles, and over it fitted a cloth cover, held in place with Velcro, that turned it into a horse. It was just the right size for a small child to scoot around on, even one that had not quite mastered walking.
It was a favorite of Caroline's, and when she outgrew it, it was immediately passed on to Sarah. Sarah loved it too. I actually don't remember Iain using it but he's a third child and I don't remember much about him as a toddler. (Someone once told me that when the placenta comes out part of your brain comes with it - I think it's true.)
So yesterday we were cleaning out a storage space and found the horse. I washed the cloth cover and had Sarah clean off the plastic with Windex and paper towels, and looked ready for a new rider. So I took it across the street and gave it to our neighbor Melinda, since we thought Adele was Just the Right Size to enjoy it. Adele was napping then, but her mom thought she would love it, and admired its retro styling. (It's hard for me to characterize things from the early 1990s as "retro" but I guess that is a sign of age.)
Later we saw Melinda and Aaron out for a walk with Adele in the stroller. As predicted, the horse was a hit. I told Melinda that Caroline had said, on learning the horse had been given away, that there was a condition attached to ownership of the horse - it could not be thrown away. When Adele is through with it, it has to be passed along to someone else. Melinda assured us it would be, and we are confident that the horse is in a good home for the next couple of years.
It was a favorite of Caroline's, and when she outgrew it, it was immediately passed on to Sarah. Sarah loved it too. I actually don't remember Iain using it but he's a third child and I don't remember much about him as a toddler. (Someone once told me that when the placenta comes out part of your brain comes with it - I think it's true.)
So yesterday we were cleaning out a storage space and found the horse. I washed the cloth cover and had Sarah clean off the plastic with Windex and paper towels, and looked ready for a new rider. So I took it across the street and gave it to our neighbor Melinda, since we thought Adele was Just the Right Size to enjoy it. Adele was napping then, but her mom thought she would love it, and admired its retro styling. (It's hard for me to characterize things from the early 1990s as "retro" but I guess that is a sign of age.)
Later we saw Melinda and Aaron out for a walk with Adele in the stroller. As predicted, the horse was a hit. I told Melinda that Caroline had said, on learning the horse had been given away, that there was a condition attached to ownership of the horse - it could not be thrown away. When Adele is through with it, it has to be passed along to someone else. Melinda assured us it would be, and we are confident that the horse is in a good home for the next couple of years.
How We Spent Thanksgiving Day
I have several half-written posts that I have never gotten finished, but it's the day after the day after Thanksgiving, so I have to start a new one.
We thought we were going to have 10 people for Thanksgiving dinner, which (as I was planning for food and drink) seemed like about thirty. Tom found the three extra leaves for the dining room table, we rounded up enough extra chairs, and we had enough plates (even if they didn't all match). The tablecloth was long enough, with the three extra leaves in place, and the chairs did fit.
In previous years Kroger has run out of fresh cranberries and we have had to make due with canned cranberry sauce. This year I bought a bag early and another one on Thanksgiving day (10 people are a lot), but there was no butternut squash to be had at Ansley Kroger. (They did still have turkeys, for the true procrastinators.) I didn't realize that Tom was waiting on me to put the turkey on (the seasoning and the mesquite chips were also on the Thanksgiving morning shopping list) so I headed on over to the Kroger at Sage Hill to look for butternut squash. They were out too, and one of the produce clerks looked at me like I deserved pity for even *thinking* I could get butternut squash on Thanksgiving morning - "That was all gone yesterday." But the manager walked up to me as I was heading to checkout and asked if I had found everything, and I told him no, that there was no butternut squash to be had, either there or at Ansley. He offered to call the Toco Hills Kroger, and sure enough they had it. In the meantime Tom was asking me where I was, so I headed home with the cranberries and the Emeril's Original and the mesquite chips so the turkey could get started and he headed over to Toco Hills to get the butternut squash later that morning, after the turkey was on.
The girls made pies - Caroline made the traditional blackberry pie, and Sarah two pumpkin pies. Thankfully the dishwasher had gotten fixed on Tuesday (a random screw had gotten caught in something, which accounting for the sound it was making, like it was in pain). Tom was responsible for preparing the turkey, which is complicated process taking several days. It includes brining - a step involving kosher salt and a cooler and a lot of water - and then he cooks it in the smoker. Tom had gotten a wireless digital thermometer so he could check the temperature of the bird from inside the house. This is the kind of gadget that Guys Who Grill really like. So all morning, while I am dealing with the mashed potatoes and the butternut squash and the green bean casserole he is asking me what the temperature was. It was usually too high or too low. He does not yet have the wireless control to adjust the damper from inside the house, or the computerized controller where you program it to maintain exactly the temperature you want for the time you want (note to Guys Who Grill: I just made that part up - these devices as far as I know do not exist. As far as I know.)
So we were expecting our neighbors Mark and Angela (who did not know each other, even though they discovered they nominally were on the same trivia team at George's on Tuesday nights), and Angela had asked if she could bring her former mother-in-law (of course, that's fine). We also had invited Susan, my flute-playing partner, and our friend Fred. But Fred was sick and Angela's former mother-in-law couldn't make it either so we were down to eight. Removing two plates and chairs from the table and rearranging the ones that remained seemed very challenging for my children. (Math education is not what it used to be. "There are 10 places set at the dining room table, one at each end and four on each side. Two guests cancel. How should the remaining places be arranged?")
There was the traditional playing of Alice's Restaurant during the turkey carving. The turkey was very good, but not as wonderfully smoky was in some previous years - but plenty good enough. I never got the gravy made (the turkey pan was not available until we were serving) but there was plenty of everything, even for the vegetarian daughters. After the meal, the kids drifted off, but the adults stayed at the table and eventually the guitars came out. There were stories about travels and music and Mark gave Iain a guitar lesson (Tom wants him to play "Sweet Jane" in the Morningside talent show). Caroline shared her Nirvana greatest hits songbook, and Tom transposed a classical guitar piece to tabulature for Mark. Susan left sometime during the afternoon, but Mark and Angela were there until 9:30 or so. It was great fun.
Friday morning Tom looked at the overflowing recycling bin and said we should take a picture of it and put it on our Christmas card, saying "We had a great Thanksgiving - we hope you have a merry Christmas."
Thanksgiving is the best of the holidays - it has defied commercialization (there is only so much you can buy for one meal), and fundamentally is about the Things That Are Really Important - family and friends, and being thankful. Gratitude is underappreciated as attitude that contributes to happiness, but that's for another time. In the meantime, there's leftovers in the refrigerator, and we are getting some much needed rain. There is indeed much to be thankful for.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
One More Way You Can Help Your Country
During those weeks we were mostly internet-less at my house, I saw an article in the New York Times about how precipitously newspaper circulation is falling in the United States. Almost all the newspapers reported declines in circulation. Newspaper circulation has been on a long decline, at a rate of about 2% per year, but the rate picked up in 2007 and was even higher during the period just reported. From April to September 2008, weekday circulation was down 4.6% and Sunday circulation down 4.8%. Among the large metropolitan daily papers, weekday circulation of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was down the most, at 13.6%. The New York Times was down 3.6% and the the Washington Post 1.9%. And of course all this was before papers felt the full brunt of the current economic crisis, when almost everyone has stopped buying almost everything.
The AJC has been rapidly retrenching, with whole sections disappearing and layoffs in the newsroom. The risk of course is as the paper gets smaller, there is less reason to subscribe to it, and pretty soon there is no paper at all. And this, I would contend, would be a very bad thing (not that I am all that enamored with the AJC, but that's a separate discussion).
Certainly one of the factors in the decline of newspapers is the rise of the internet (why buy the newspaper if you can read it on line for free?) as well as the proliferation of other media. First it was all-news-all-the-time television and now it is the web, with instant access to almost everything. But our newspapers are at risk, until someone figures out a business model that will make it possible for the a great paper to survive in this new era, and if our papers are at risk, so is our country.
The internet is great - everybody's a publisher, thanks to blogger.com, and occasionally some "citizen journalist" really does break a big story. But even then, it needs the amplification and credibility of a major news organization to make it matter, and no one does that better than our newspapers. Television - even our 24/7 news channels - have too short an attention span and kept talking about whether or not that baby was John Edwards' while the Russian tanks were rolling into the Republic of Georgia. It's the newspapers - and especially our great national papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times - that can invest the staff time on a regular basis on stories that really matter, stories that otherwise would never be told, stories that hold leaders accountable. This is a critical function in democracy, and we really do need our newspapers to do it.
Of course the big news about newspapers this week was the run on Wednesday morning's paper. Everyone wanted a copy to keep, to remember the historic headlines announcing that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. The AJC ended up selling 16,000 copies in their lobby, and they usually don't sell papers there at all. Even with larger-than-usual runs, newspapers sold out and now copies of Wednesday's paper are selling on Craigslist and ebay for more than a hundred dollars.
Of course, for around $50 a month you can get the New York Times delivered to your house - your very own copy, every day! - and the AJC is substantially less. No need to buy a single copy on ebay. If you don't subscribe to a daily newspaper - any paper, pick your own favorite - do it today. Do it to stay informed. Do it to learn things you didn't even know you didn't know. But most importantly, do it for the good of our country, which at the moment needs all the help it can get.
The AJC has been rapidly retrenching, with whole sections disappearing and layoffs in the newsroom. The risk of course is as the paper gets smaller, there is less reason to subscribe to it, and pretty soon there is no paper at all. And this, I would contend, would be a very bad thing (not that I am all that enamored with the AJC, but that's a separate discussion).
Certainly one of the factors in the decline of newspapers is the rise of the internet (why buy the newspaper if you can read it on line for free?) as well as the proliferation of other media. First it was all-news-all-the-time television and now it is the web, with instant access to almost everything. But our newspapers are at risk, until someone figures out a business model that will make it possible for the a great paper to survive in this new era, and if our papers are at risk, so is our country.
The internet is great - everybody's a publisher, thanks to blogger.com, and occasionally some "citizen journalist" really does break a big story. But even then, it needs the amplification and credibility of a major news organization to make it matter, and no one does that better than our newspapers. Television - even our 24/7 news channels - have too short an attention span and kept talking about whether or not that baby was John Edwards' while the Russian tanks were rolling into the Republic of Georgia. It's the newspapers - and especially our great national papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times - that can invest the staff time on a regular basis on stories that really matter, stories that otherwise would never be told, stories that hold leaders accountable. This is a critical function in democracy, and we really do need our newspapers to do it.
Of course the big news about newspapers this week was the run on Wednesday morning's paper. Everyone wanted a copy to keep, to remember the historic headlines announcing that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. The AJC ended up selling 16,000 copies in their lobby, and they usually don't sell papers there at all. Even with larger-than-usual runs, newspapers sold out and now copies of Wednesday's paper are selling on Craigslist and ebay for more than a hundred dollars.
Of course, for around $50 a month you can get the New York Times delivered to your house - your very own copy, every day! - and the AJC is substantially less. No need to buy a single copy on ebay. If you don't subscribe to a daily newspaper - any paper, pick your own favorite - do it today. Do it to stay informed. Do it to learn things you didn't even know you didn't know. But most importantly, do it for the good of our country, which at the moment needs all the help it can get.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
What Next for Sidney Marcus Park?
The dishwasher still doesn't work, but we have a new internet service provider, which so far seems to have kept us mostly connected - but in the meantime, I have not written about so many things that otherwise I would have told you about. There was the follow up on the Head Lice Committee, for example (short version: APS said "no") and tweaking of the new zoning plan for Morningside Elementary School. But there are no action items with either one of those, so let's go straight to the topic at hand.
We all know it has been the season of Major Public Policy Debates, and while the national discussion has been focused on the economic meltdown and the recent election, here in the neighborhood there has been another question under discussion, and that of course would be the fate of the sand box at Sidney Marcus Park. Our neighborhood association, the Morningside-Lenox Park Association, hosted a discussion about this at the monthly MLPA meeting in October. I wasn't there, but the head of the new Sand Box Committee (I do hope they have a T-shirt) has written a nice summary of the issues and posted it to the MLPA listserv.
When the new playground was installed at Sidney Marcus Park a few years ago, it included a new rubber play surface. This surface is expensive, even though the raw material - shredded tires, as far as I know - is not. The original sand box was directly adjacent to the playground, and I remember the sand overflowing onto that rubber surface and that people expressed concerns then that the sand would damage the play surface. That sand box got converted to a planter early on and a new one was built a little farther away on the other side of the walkway.
Even though it's farther away, the sand still does not totally stay confined to the enclosure, and still ends up on the rubber surface and in the drain that is important to maintaining proper drainage. If the drain gets clogged up, the rubber surface is at risk, too, so the sand box has to go. But it really is the only thing at the playground for younger children, so the decision was to come up with a plan for something that can be added to Sidney Marcus Park for the toddler set. Natasha Moffitt (nmoffitt@kslaw.com) has volunteered to chair the Sand Box Committee, and she is looking for help with this task. So if you can help, let her know. The timeframe is short - a plan is needed by December - and the ultimate decision will the the city's, but if this is something you care about, consider volunteering. There also will need to be some money raised, no doubt, and if you don't want to be on the committee but you could help with that, I am sure she would like to hear from you, too.
I don't know if it came up in the deliberations or not, but for years I have wondered why - in our highly educated, parents-with-Ph.D.'s-and-other-doctoral-degrees neighborhood - we had an outdoor sand box at all. From a cat's point of view, this is, well, a sand box, and that means we have to assume that cats are using it for the purpose that cats use sand boxes. One has to assume that it is contaminated with cat feces, which means some risk of toxoplasmosis (see the CDC fact sheet on toxoplasmosis for the details: http://www.cdc.gov/toxoplasmosis/prevent.html). If the point is a safe place for toddlers to play, I would suggest avoiding the litter box motif.
Years ago a co-worker who lives in one of those outside-the-Perimeter counties found herself in John Howell Park and told me later how lucky I am to be in a neighborhood where there are parks. And we are. We have wonderful parks for picnics and neighborhood events and play and walking the dog and making new friends and meeting our neighbors. We are very lucky.
And besides volunteering to for the committee, there is another way we can all help. According to the sand box email, there's a clean up at Sidney Marcus Park this afternoon, from 3-6 p.m. Neighbors bearing rakes, shovels, and leaf blowers are especially welcome. And I don't know for a fact that it kills toxo, but if you decide to have a picnic afterwards, well, I'd bring some hand sanitizer.
We all know it has been the season of Major Public Policy Debates, and while the national discussion has been focused on the economic meltdown and the recent election, here in the neighborhood there has been another question under discussion, and that of course would be the fate of the sand box at Sidney Marcus Park. Our neighborhood association, the Morningside-Lenox Park Association, hosted a discussion about this at the monthly MLPA meeting in October. I wasn't there, but the head of the new Sand Box Committee (I do hope they have a T-shirt) has written a nice summary of the issues and posted it to the MLPA listserv.
When the new playground was installed at Sidney Marcus Park a few years ago, it included a new rubber play surface. This surface is expensive, even though the raw material - shredded tires, as far as I know - is not. The original sand box was directly adjacent to the playground, and I remember the sand overflowing onto that rubber surface and that people expressed concerns then that the sand would damage the play surface. That sand box got converted to a planter early on and a new one was built a little farther away on the other side of the walkway.
Even though it's farther away, the sand still does not totally stay confined to the enclosure, and still ends up on the rubber surface and in the drain that is important to maintaining proper drainage. If the drain gets clogged up, the rubber surface is at risk, too, so the sand box has to go. But it really is the only thing at the playground for younger children, so the decision was to come up with a plan for something that can be added to Sidney Marcus Park for the toddler set. Natasha Moffitt (nmoffitt@kslaw.com) has volunteered to chair the Sand Box Committee, and she is looking for help with this task. So if you can help, let her know. The timeframe is short - a plan is needed by December - and the ultimate decision will the the city's, but if this is something you care about, consider volunteering. There also will need to be some money raised, no doubt, and if you don't want to be on the committee but you could help with that, I am sure she would like to hear from you, too.
I don't know if it came up in the deliberations or not, but for years I have wondered why - in our highly educated, parents-with-Ph.D.'s-and-other-doctoral-degrees neighborhood - we had an outdoor sand box at all. From a cat's point of view, this is, well, a sand box, and that means we have to assume that cats are using it for the purpose that cats use sand boxes. One has to assume that it is contaminated with cat feces, which means some risk of toxoplasmosis (see the CDC fact sheet on toxoplasmosis for the details: http://www.cdc.gov/toxoplasmosis/prevent.html). If the point is a safe place for toddlers to play, I would suggest avoiding the litter box motif.
Years ago a co-worker who lives in one of those outside-the-Perimeter counties found herself in John Howell Park and told me later how lucky I am to be in a neighborhood where there are parks. And we are. We have wonderful parks for picnics and neighborhood events and play and walking the dog and making new friends and meeting our neighbors. We are very lucky.
And besides volunteering to for the committee, there is another way we can all help. According to the sand box email, there's a clean up at Sidney Marcus Park this afternoon, from 3-6 p.m. Neighbors bearing rakes, shovels, and leaf blowers are especially welcome. And I don't know for a fact that it kills toxo, but if you decide to have a picnic afterwards, well, I'd bring some hand sanitizer.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
The Race for Research
I am writing this at a coffee shop, since we finally gave up on Earthlink a few days ago and now are internet-connection-less at home; we are in the progress of moving to AT&T and hopefully that will work better.
The big news is that Sunday is the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation's Race for Research. Last November, when the race occurred, Amy was newly diagnosed, and by chance I saw the flyer at Emory when I was having my mammogram. Amy couldn't walk with us, but she was there, and cheered us on; Lynsley made a sign, and we took pictures. Iain ran with Dan, and besides the neighbors, other friends of Amy and of Max were there. We weren't very organized, but I said to Lynsley, "Next year - T-shirts!"
So we actually have a team this year, and we sort of have T-shirts, thanks to a color inkjet printer and iron-on transfers from Office Depot - Amy is still waiting for a couple more, but I ran out and didn't have a chance to get to the store til now. But now I have them, and I'll print up more tonight.
At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Guiliani gave a talk in which he ridiculed Barack Obama's background as a community organizer. Setting aside how I feel about the two Presidential candidates, I was deeply disappointed that Mr. Guiliani chose to say what he did.
Community is really important. It's a ride to the doctor when your car breaks down, and someone to look after your kids when you can't get home from work on time. It's someone bringing you a meal when the doctor gives you really bad news and and going across the street late at night to ask someone for advice about whether or not your baby needs to go to the ER. It's the people who care about whether or not your street is safe from hazards, whether it is drug dealers or speeders or predatory lenders, and who can call 911 when you aren't home and can't. It's neighborhood watches and the Morningside Security Patrol. It's wine and cheese on a Sunday evening or a potluck at the end of summer or even guys playing guitars in the parking lot. Maybe in Rudy Guiliani's neighborhood no one does these things, but on my street we do. And it doesn't just happen.
And on Sunday, we'll be in the parking lot at Manuel's Tavern, and this year, we'll have T-shirts. They'll be hugs and photos, and this year, Amy will be walking with us. And when I'm dead, I would be honored to be identified as a community organizer.
See you Sunday. Let me know if you need a transfer for your T-shirt. Hot iron, no steam.
The big news is that Sunday is the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation's Race for Research. Last November, when the race occurred, Amy was newly diagnosed, and by chance I saw the flyer at Emory when I was having my mammogram. Amy couldn't walk with us, but she was there, and cheered us on; Lynsley made a sign, and we took pictures. Iain ran with Dan, and besides the neighbors, other friends of Amy and of Max were there. We weren't very organized, but I said to Lynsley, "Next year - T-shirts!"
So we actually have a team this year, and we sort of have T-shirts, thanks to a color inkjet printer and iron-on transfers from Office Depot - Amy is still waiting for a couple more, but I ran out and didn't have a chance to get to the store til now. But now I have them, and I'll print up more tonight.
At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Guiliani gave a talk in which he ridiculed Barack Obama's background as a community organizer. Setting aside how I feel about the two Presidential candidates, I was deeply disappointed that Mr. Guiliani chose to say what he did.
Community is really important. It's a ride to the doctor when your car breaks down, and someone to look after your kids when you can't get home from work on time. It's someone bringing you a meal when the doctor gives you really bad news and and going across the street late at night to ask someone for advice about whether or not your baby needs to go to the ER. It's the people who care about whether or not your street is safe from hazards, whether it is drug dealers or speeders or predatory lenders, and who can call 911 when you aren't home and can't. It's neighborhood watches and the Morningside Security Patrol. It's wine and cheese on a Sunday evening or a potluck at the end of summer or even guys playing guitars in the parking lot. Maybe in Rudy Guiliani's neighborhood no one does these things, but on my street we do. And it doesn't just happen.
And on Sunday, we'll be in the parking lot at Manuel's Tavern, and this year, we'll have T-shirts. They'll be hugs and photos, and this year, Amy will be walking with us. And when I'm dead, I would be honored to be identified as a community organizer.
See you Sunday. Let me know if you need a transfer for your T-shirt. Hot iron, no steam.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Hitting the Wall on North Highland
If you are driving north on North Highland, the road starts a curve to the right before you get to the intersection with Wessyngton Road. There are reflective yellow signs positioned to catch the headlight beam of northbound drivers headed straight to get their attention that the road is going off to the right, but still drivers miss the curve. This tends to happen at night, and speeding and alcohol may play a role (having no actual data, I have resorted to weasel language, but I am pretty sure that’s true).
There is a house on North Morningside just north of the intersection with Wessyngton Road that is set up from street level, with a nice front porch and a lawn that slopes down to a stone retaining wall that keeps the yard from falling on to the sidewalk. As I recall the retaining wall was rebuilt a few years ago; it’s a substantial wall, which is good (at least for the wall) because it is one of the places that cars that don’t make the curve end up.
We walk by this house regularly, and one of the things we do is to look for automotive debris scattered on the sidewalk or along the curb or even on nearby lawns. We regularly find the detritus of modern automobiles: hubcaps, chunks of fenders, unidentified black plastic gizmos with plastic-covered wires coming out of them, and shattered bits glass, mirrors, and plastic. I had thought if I lived in that house I would make a gigantic collage, with all this stuff embedded in mortar. Perhaps it could even be shaped like a car – a high tech, glittering vehicle covered with sparkles, a mosaic of glass and broken metal.
There was one particularly spectacular accident there several years ago. As longtime watchers of CSI we know how to investigate the scene and reconstruct what happened. The northbound car was traveling fast and the driver missed the curve, then lost control. The car tilted on to the two drivers’ side wheels and went up on to the sidewalk south of Wessyngton, squeezing between the retaining wall there and miraculously not crashing into anything but pushing a sign out of the way by a few inches. Still on the sidewalk, the car barreled into the stone retaining wall of this house north of the Wessyngton intersection, knocking stones out of place and ending up upside down in the street in front of the house.
The upside down part we know because one night soon after this happened we were talking to a woman who lived in the house. She said that there had been three people in the car. One of them went off in an ambulance, the driver got taken away by the police, and the remaining passenger called a taxi to get home that night. And before the wrecker came to take away the car, still upside down in the street, another intoxicated driver crashed into it.
I had thought what great sport it would be, if I were younger and didn’t have the kind of life I do and if I didn’t need to sleep, to spend weekend nights sitting on that porch, safe above the mayhem in the street below, drinking beer and watching the cars crash into my retaining wall. I’d have my phone out there on the porch with me – a cordless one, not the cell phone, so the 911 operator who know where I was calling from – and call in the accidents. A car just crashed in front of my house. Can you send someone? I think you need to send an ambulance too. They say someone’s hurt.
South of Wessyngton near the intersection of Highland and Morningside, there are now orange reflective barrels. They’ve been there a while now. I don’t know if they are there to try to keep the drunken and distracted drivers on the road or for some other reason, but I haven’t seen as much car debris scattered farther up the street recently. So maybe the barrels have helped.
We’ve been waiting for that stone retaining wall to get fixed; the stones that were knocked out never got mortared back in place. We thought it was an insurance thing or something. But we noticed a couple of weeks ago that the house looked vacant and there were notices posted on the door. Last night when Iain and I were walking to Caramba I walked up to the door and read them. The house has been winterized (“Don’t use the toilets!” a fluorescent orange notice screams), processed by some company, and a simple white notice provides a phone number and email address that the occupants need to contact urgently. And it looks like there are new locks on the door.
There is a house on North Morningside just north of the intersection with Wessyngton Road that is set up from street level, with a nice front porch and a lawn that slopes down to a stone retaining wall that keeps the yard from falling on to the sidewalk. As I recall the retaining wall was rebuilt a few years ago; it’s a substantial wall, which is good (at least for the wall) because it is one of the places that cars that don’t make the curve end up.
We walk by this house regularly, and one of the things we do is to look for automotive debris scattered on the sidewalk or along the curb or even on nearby lawns. We regularly find the detritus of modern automobiles: hubcaps, chunks of fenders, unidentified black plastic gizmos with plastic-covered wires coming out of them, and shattered bits glass, mirrors, and plastic. I had thought if I lived in that house I would make a gigantic collage, with all this stuff embedded in mortar. Perhaps it could even be shaped like a car – a high tech, glittering vehicle covered with sparkles, a mosaic of glass and broken metal.
There was one particularly spectacular accident there several years ago. As longtime watchers of CSI we know how to investigate the scene and reconstruct what happened. The northbound car was traveling fast and the driver missed the curve, then lost control. The car tilted on to the two drivers’ side wheels and went up on to the sidewalk south of Wessyngton, squeezing between the retaining wall there and miraculously not crashing into anything but pushing a sign out of the way by a few inches. Still on the sidewalk, the car barreled into the stone retaining wall of this house north of the Wessyngton intersection, knocking stones out of place and ending up upside down in the street in front of the house.
The upside down part we know because one night soon after this happened we were talking to a woman who lived in the house. She said that there had been three people in the car. One of them went off in an ambulance, the driver got taken away by the police, and the remaining passenger called a taxi to get home that night. And before the wrecker came to take away the car, still upside down in the street, another intoxicated driver crashed into it.
I had thought what great sport it would be, if I were younger and didn’t have the kind of life I do and if I didn’t need to sleep, to spend weekend nights sitting on that porch, safe above the mayhem in the street below, drinking beer and watching the cars crash into my retaining wall. I’d have my phone out there on the porch with me – a cordless one, not the cell phone, so the 911 operator who know where I was calling from – and call in the accidents. A car just crashed in front of my house. Can you send someone? I think you need to send an ambulance too. They say someone’s hurt.
South of Wessyngton near the intersection of Highland and Morningside, there are now orange reflective barrels. They’ve been there a while now. I don’t know if they are there to try to keep the drunken and distracted drivers on the road or for some other reason, but I haven’t seen as much car debris scattered farther up the street recently. So maybe the barrels have helped.
We’ve been waiting for that stone retaining wall to get fixed; the stones that were knocked out never got mortared back in place. We thought it was an insurance thing or something. But we noticed a couple of weeks ago that the house looked vacant and there were notices posted on the door. Last night when Iain and I were walking to Caramba I walked up to the door and read them. The house has been winterized (“Don’t use the toilets!” a fluorescent orange notice screams), processed by some company, and a simple white notice provides a phone number and email address that the occupants need to contact urgently. And it looks like there are new locks on the door.
Monday, October 13, 2008
The Trees of Wessyngton Road
My understanding of neighborhood history is that our street, Wessyngton Road, was a late addition to Morningside. Much of the neighborhood dates to the 1920s, but not Wessyngton Road – our street was built around 1950, and that’s when the older homes on the street were built. There’s been some newer construction too, and of course now some of the 1950s houses are being purchased, torn down, and replaced with Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAHs).
I am not sure when the oak trees – the tall, massive oaks that still stand in a few places on our street – were planted, but they are old, and many of them are at the end of their life. They might have died anyway, but the unfriendly urban environment and drought are definitely taking their toll. One fell over, blocking the street, a couple of months ago; others have been removed to make way for LHADAHs. There briefly was a stop work order, over tree issues, at one of the LHADAHs up the street, but they ended up removing the trees and continuing the construction. Now there’s an orange sign in front of another house, announcing that trees are going to be removed – presumably to allow another LHADAH to be built.
When I bought this house, there was one oak tree in the front yard, and a stump where another one had been cut down by the former owner. It was 13 or 14 years ago that one day half the leaves on the remaining one just turned brown. The tree was dying and the only question was would we get it taken down before it fell over.
Tom wanted to replace it with a gingko, and we went to a large tree farm and picked one out. This was when Sarah was a baby, and I remember that Tom had her in a backpack – it was there that she said her first word, or at least the first one we understood (“duck” – the noun, as opposed to the verb). Tom wanted a gingko because an arborist had recommended it, as a tree that could stand the tough life in the city. It was supposed to be a male tree, since female gingkos make fruit (“the fruit smells like cat vomit,” Tom told me helpfully).
I guess determining the gender of gingko trees is an inexact art, because a few years later our tree started making fruit (surprise!) but it really doesn’t smell like cat vomit; the only real problem is that we have to continually clear out the small gingko trees from underneath, or otherwise our front yard will become a gingko forest. It is now a tall tree, as tall as our house, and in the fall the leaves turn bright yellow. But it doesn’t make shade the way the old oak tree did; I wish we still had an oak tree that would shade the house and the asphalt and help keep things cooler in the summer.
Some of the houses on Wessyngton have no trees at all. The LHADAH that is on the market now – the one that they are asking $1.3 million for – has two small maple trees in the tiny front yard. They may grow to be beautiful trees, and provide wonderful scarlet color in the fall, but they will never shade the street. They took trees out to build the LHADAH next to it, and on the other side is that orange sign.
When we were walking the dog this morning, Tom said we need more trees on our street. A few weeks ago, Trees Atlanta hosted a workshop to teach people how to plan a neighborhood tree planting event; I would have liked to have gone, but that was the weekend of the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage, and I didn't go *anywhere.* Maybe next year.
I am not sure when the oak trees – the tall, massive oaks that still stand in a few places on our street – were planted, but they are old, and many of them are at the end of their life. They might have died anyway, but the unfriendly urban environment and drought are definitely taking their toll. One fell over, blocking the street, a couple of months ago; others have been removed to make way for LHADAHs. There briefly was a stop work order, over tree issues, at one of the LHADAHs up the street, but they ended up removing the trees and continuing the construction. Now there’s an orange sign in front of another house, announcing that trees are going to be removed – presumably to allow another LHADAH to be built.
When I bought this house, there was one oak tree in the front yard, and a stump where another one had been cut down by the former owner. It was 13 or 14 years ago that one day half the leaves on the remaining one just turned brown. The tree was dying and the only question was would we get it taken down before it fell over.
Tom wanted to replace it with a gingko, and we went to a large tree farm and picked one out. This was when Sarah was a baby, and I remember that Tom had her in a backpack – it was there that she said her first word, or at least the first one we understood (“duck” – the noun, as opposed to the verb). Tom wanted a gingko because an arborist had recommended it, as a tree that could stand the tough life in the city. It was supposed to be a male tree, since female gingkos make fruit (“the fruit smells like cat vomit,” Tom told me helpfully).
I guess determining the gender of gingko trees is an inexact art, because a few years later our tree started making fruit (surprise!) but it really doesn’t smell like cat vomit; the only real problem is that we have to continually clear out the small gingko trees from underneath, or otherwise our front yard will become a gingko forest. It is now a tall tree, as tall as our house, and in the fall the leaves turn bright yellow. But it doesn’t make shade the way the old oak tree did; I wish we still had an oak tree that would shade the house and the asphalt and help keep things cooler in the summer.
Some of the houses on Wessyngton have no trees at all. The LHADAH that is on the market now – the one that they are asking $1.3 million for – has two small maple trees in the tiny front yard. They may grow to be beautiful trees, and provide wonderful scarlet color in the fall, but they will never shade the street. They took trees out to build the LHADAH next to it, and on the other side is that orange sign.
When we were walking the dog this morning, Tom said we need more trees on our street. A few weeks ago, Trees Atlanta hosted a workshop to teach people how to plan a neighborhood tree planting event; I would have liked to have gone, but that was the weekend of the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage, and I didn't go *anywhere.* Maybe next year.
Columbus Day Update
Our internet connection has been intermittent (thank you, Earthlink) so I haven't posted in a while. Let's see - where were we when I last wrote something here?
The dishwasher had stopped working. Since then, the repairman has been to the house twice and the second time it was fixed. However, yesterday it started making a noise that was Clearly Abnormal for a Dishwasher, and we have stopped using it again.
We also didn't have internet access, because Earthlink had told us we could no longer have a DSL line. I am not sure what their current thinking is on that (Tom is the one who talks to them regularly) but we now have intermittent access. It will be on for a while, then it's off.
That also was the weekend of the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage. Although they said that things might not be completely back to normal until Columbus Day Weekend (which is now), the plastic bags covering the pumps disappeared pretty quickly - no thanks to Governor Perdue, whose response was to ask for oil to be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; I guess no one told him that the problem was the refineries, not oil, but oh well - he was in Spain at the time when all this was happening.
That also was before the $700 billion dollar bailout proposal went through that was supposed to get the credit markets unfrozen. So Congress passed it last week, including giving the Treasury Department authority they didn't want to directly recapitalize banks, and the stock market kept going down all week and now the new Idea that Will Get the Economy out of the Toilet is directly recapitalizing banks.
Speaking of banks - our bank, Wachovia, is/was the fourth largest bank in the United States, and they went under sometime within the last week or two. CitiBank and Wells Fargo got into a tussle over the parts that were left that they wanted but Wells Fargo won. I was afraid we had more money in Wachovia than was covered by the FDIC (my mom's house in Oklahoma sold recently, and we had just deposited that check a couple of months ago) so right around the time Wachovia went under, I transferred some money to another bank.
I saw a patient on Friday who I hadn't seen before. The chart said he had significant mental health and substance abuse problems, and it looked from the chart like he had been homeless. But when I talked to him, he clearly described his symptoms and could tell me when he had had similar symptoms before, and what he had been treated with the last time. I told him his blood pressure was a little up, and he said it was because of all the stuff going on. What stuff?, I asked. Those guys running that company who got billions of dollars from the government, and then went on that week long spa vacation, he said. Oh, AIG, I said. Yes, he said, and went on to enumerate how much they spent on food and on spa treatments and whatever else they did.
In the meantime, the presidential candidates are arguing about who will cut taxes the most. It's not clear that anyone is prepared to ask us to do anything hard - if we just drill for more oil and keep those "Support Our Troops" magnets on our cars, it'll all be okay.
It's not okay, and doing more of the same is not going to make it okay. It would be nice if someone running for something would be willing to say that.
The dishwasher had stopped working. Since then, the repairman has been to the house twice and the second time it was fixed. However, yesterday it started making a noise that was Clearly Abnormal for a Dishwasher, and we have stopped using it again.
We also didn't have internet access, because Earthlink had told us we could no longer have a DSL line. I am not sure what their current thinking is on that (Tom is the one who talks to them regularly) but we now have intermittent access. It will be on for a while, then it's off.
That also was the weekend of the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage. Although they said that things might not be completely back to normal until Columbus Day Weekend (which is now), the plastic bags covering the pumps disappeared pretty quickly - no thanks to Governor Perdue, whose response was to ask for oil to be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; I guess no one told him that the problem was the refineries, not oil, but oh well - he was in Spain at the time when all this was happening.
That also was before the $700 billion dollar bailout proposal went through that was supposed to get the credit markets unfrozen. So Congress passed it last week, including giving the Treasury Department authority they didn't want to directly recapitalize banks, and the stock market kept going down all week and now the new Idea that Will Get the Economy out of the Toilet is directly recapitalizing banks.
Speaking of banks - our bank, Wachovia, is/was the fourth largest bank in the United States, and they went under sometime within the last week or two. CitiBank and Wells Fargo got into a tussle over the parts that were left that they wanted but Wells Fargo won. I was afraid we had more money in Wachovia than was covered by the FDIC (my mom's house in Oklahoma sold recently, and we had just deposited that check a couple of months ago) so right around the time Wachovia went under, I transferred some money to another bank.
I saw a patient on Friday who I hadn't seen before. The chart said he had significant mental health and substance abuse problems, and it looked from the chart like he had been homeless. But when I talked to him, he clearly described his symptoms and could tell me when he had had similar symptoms before, and what he had been treated with the last time. I told him his blood pressure was a little up, and he said it was because of all the stuff going on. What stuff?, I asked. Those guys running that company who got billions of dollars from the government, and then went on that week long spa vacation, he said. Oh, AIG, I said. Yes, he said, and went on to enumerate how much they spent on food and on spa treatments and whatever else they did.
In the meantime, the presidential candidates are arguing about who will cut taxes the most. It's not clear that anyone is prepared to ask us to do anything hard - if we just drill for more oil and keep those "Support Our Troops" magnets on our cars, it'll all be okay.
It's not okay, and doing more of the same is not going to make it okay. It would be nice if someone running for something would be willing to say that.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Welcome to the Third World
A couple of weeks ago our dishwasher broke. It is a GE Profile, with an illuminated shiny stainless steel interior and a brushed stainless steel exterior. Great design, from the aesthetic point of view, but it doesn’t work. A couple of months ago it was leaking and the repair guy came and replaced a gasket. That seemed to stop the leaking but then two or three weeks ago it stopped working altogether. The repair guy came back and said he would have to order the parts, but they are on backorder. He was back last week, with the parts, and worked on it some more, but it still doesn’t work. He is supposed to be back tomorrow – but of course gasoline is in short supply in the Atlanta metro area, so who knows if he’ll make it?
On Wednesday, our internet connection stopped working. (I am writing this off line, and will upload it when I get access to the internet.) Since then Tom has spent several hours on hold or talking with various Earthlink support people. Finally one of them called back Friday night and told him that the problem was that Earthlink had switched our DSL from one station to another and now we were too far from the station, so unless they can switch us back, well, we just can’t get DSL any more. It will take them 5 days to figure out whether or not they can do that - or maybe 10.
Of course, the U.S. economy stopped working a week or so ago too. I’m not trying to get a loan, but from what I’ve heard and read, the credit markets are frozen up because The Smartest Guys in the Room dreamed up devilishly complex financial instruments that were too complicated for anyone to understand, and no one said “no” – not the executives of the companies, who were making a bundle off this, or their Boards of Directors, or their auditors, or the regulators. No one said “no” and it doesn’t look like they even asked any questions. And now, Congress is talking about a $700 billion dollar clean up. That’s on top of Bear Stearns and A.I.G. Put it all together, and pretty soon, well, you’re talking real money.
Here in Atlanta, there is hardly any gasoline. Tom and I have been talking about what we’ll do if we have to get by on the ½ tank in the minivan and the ¼ tank in my car for, well, who knows long. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and shopped for the week. There are doctors’ appointments on Wednesday. Iain can walk to school, but what about the girls? Can they take the MARTA bus? Caroline went to a movie last night at Phipps Plaza – she walked to the MARTA station with two friends. We asked if the attendance was down at the movie for a Saturday night. Maybe a little, she said, but there were a lot of people on MARTA. I could work from home some of the time, if we had an internet connection, but we don’t (see above).
We are not big television watchers in my house, but we’ve been watching the local news the last day or so, trying to find out about the gasoline shortage. What’s going to happen on Monday morning, when people from this whole metropolitan area, including the MARTA-free suburbs, need to get to work but can’t because the tank is empty, or are afraid to, because what if they can’t get home? Who is going to go anywhere that they don’t have to go? Our state leaders have been notably absent from the airwaves, although I did hear Governor Perdue Friday evening asking people to not make trips that aren’t essential. Thanks, Governor Perdue, we already figured that part out.
None of this of course is anyone’s fault. It all just happened.
While Tom was out looking for gasoline, I was washing the dishes. Standing at the sink, thinking about the dropping reservoirs (it just happened that Atlanta has not made plans to assure a longterm water supply, while the metro area grew unfettered, without any plans on how to deal with a sustained drought) I was imagining the tap running dry.
But forget investment in new technology to get us out of our dependence on oil from countries that hate us, or investment in our young people, or investment in research – no, Congress is going to spend $700 billion in a hope of cleaning up after a bunch of guys with six and seven and eight figure salaries who have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.
It just happened.
On Wednesday, our internet connection stopped working. (I am writing this off line, and will upload it when I get access to the internet.) Since then Tom has spent several hours on hold or talking with various Earthlink support people. Finally one of them called back Friday night and told him that the problem was that Earthlink had switched our DSL from one station to another and now we were too far from the station, so unless they can switch us back, well, we just can’t get DSL any more. It will take them 5 days to figure out whether or not they can do that - or maybe 10.
Of course, the U.S. economy stopped working a week or so ago too. I’m not trying to get a loan, but from what I’ve heard and read, the credit markets are frozen up because The Smartest Guys in the Room dreamed up devilishly complex financial instruments that were too complicated for anyone to understand, and no one said “no” – not the executives of the companies, who were making a bundle off this, or their Boards of Directors, or their auditors, or the regulators. No one said “no” and it doesn’t look like they even asked any questions. And now, Congress is talking about a $700 billion dollar clean up. That’s on top of Bear Stearns and A.I.G. Put it all together, and pretty soon, well, you’re talking real money.
Here in Atlanta, there is hardly any gasoline. Tom and I have been talking about what we’ll do if we have to get by on the ½ tank in the minivan and the ¼ tank in my car for, well, who knows long. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and shopped for the week. There are doctors’ appointments on Wednesday. Iain can walk to school, but what about the girls? Can they take the MARTA bus? Caroline went to a movie last night at Phipps Plaza – she walked to the MARTA station with two friends. We asked if the attendance was down at the movie for a Saturday night. Maybe a little, she said, but there were a lot of people on MARTA. I could work from home some of the time, if we had an internet connection, but we don’t (see above).
We are not big television watchers in my house, but we’ve been watching the local news the last day or so, trying to find out about the gasoline shortage. What’s going to happen on Monday morning, when people from this whole metropolitan area, including the MARTA-free suburbs, need to get to work but can’t because the tank is empty, or are afraid to, because what if they can’t get home? Who is going to go anywhere that they don’t have to go? Our state leaders have been notably absent from the airwaves, although I did hear Governor Perdue Friday evening asking people to not make trips that aren’t essential. Thanks, Governor Perdue, we already figured that part out.
None of this of course is anyone’s fault. It all just happened.
While Tom was out looking for gasoline, I was washing the dishes. Standing at the sink, thinking about the dropping reservoirs (it just happened that Atlanta has not made plans to assure a longterm water supply, while the metro area grew unfettered, without any plans on how to deal with a sustained drought) I was imagining the tap running dry.
But forget investment in new technology to get us out of our dependence on oil from countries that hate us, or investment in our young people, or investment in research – no, Congress is going to spend $700 billion in a hope of cleaning up after a bunch of guys with six and seven and eight figure salaries who have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.
It just happened.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
More about Head Lice
We got the dreaded letter from the school a couple weeks ago. It wasn't the most dreaded letter ("Your child is infested with head lice") but it was the second most dreaded one ("A child in your child's class is infested with head lice"). Iain's hair is pretty long, and we've told him if he gets head lice we are going to cut it really short. I personally do not believe that this constitutes child abuse, but I'm not sure that that's how Iain sees it.
I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.
I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.
The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.
I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.
I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.
The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
A Place of Safety
What a week. Houston - America's 4th largest city - still has large areas without power, much of Galveston was seriously damaged, the Bolivar Peninsula was pretty much wiped off the map, and it doesn't even make the news.
On Sunday, before the week's market convulsions, we sang a song* that included the line:
Lead us to a place, guide us with Your grace to a place where we'll be safe.
The images that that line evoked at the time were of weather - wind and rain and rising water - and in the shadow of September 11, of opportunities lost, and what would really make us safe. I started a posting about that, but I didn't get very far.
Then on Monday the market dived, and with every passing day the scale and scope of what was happening became clearer and more frightening. At this point, only six days later, "a safe place" means a place where you can invest your money without exposure to mortgage-derived securities.
What we heard this week is that credit is suddenly tight in a way that threatens normal functioning of our economy. Businesses that are sound are having trouble borrowing, and things are much tighter for mortgages and car loans. Walking around the neighborhood, I see the houses under construction (almost all of them Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses) and wonder what all this means for the people who are building them.
Tom had a conversation with a builder who lived across the street until recently. He had been to his bank and had been told that he was the only builder that the bank did business with who had not defaulted on something. That was before the market dived, before the credit markets dried up.
So - here we are. A place where we'll be safe sounds really good. Leaders who could help us get there would be even better. And a strategy other than (or in addition to) prayer - well, that would be priceless.
*The Prayer, with Lead Us, Lord by Carole Sager and David Foster
On Sunday, before the week's market convulsions, we sang a song* that included the line:
Lead us to a place, guide us with Your grace to a place where we'll be safe.
The images that that line evoked at the time were of weather - wind and rain and rising water - and in the shadow of September 11, of opportunities lost, and what would really make us safe. I started a posting about that, but I didn't get very far.
Then on Monday the market dived, and with every passing day the scale and scope of what was happening became clearer and more frightening. At this point, only six days later, "a safe place" means a place where you can invest your money without exposure to mortgage-derived securities.
What we heard this week is that credit is suddenly tight in a way that threatens normal functioning of our economy. Businesses that are sound are having trouble borrowing, and things are much tighter for mortgages and car loans. Walking around the neighborhood, I see the houses under construction (almost all of them Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses) and wonder what all this means for the people who are building them.
Tom had a conversation with a builder who lived across the street until recently. He had been to his bank and had been told that he was the only builder that the bank did business with who had not defaulted on something. That was before the market dived, before the credit markets dried up.
So - here we are. A place where we'll be safe sounds really good. Leaders who could help us get there would be even better. And a strategy other than (or in addition to) prayer - well, that would be priceless.
*The Prayer, with Lead Us, Lord by Carole Sager and David Foster
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Fired Up! at Fire Station No. 19
This morning Iain ran the 4th Annual Fired Up 5K race. Registration was set up inside Fire Station No. 19, and the fire truck was outside. I think a few of the fire fighters ran in the race, but most of them were standing around outside. There were also several volunteers from the Greenbriar Lions Club there, middle-aged African-American men and women, wearing yellow vests covered with pins and patches, helping people get in the right line during registration, staffing the finish line, helping with different tasks. I asked them where they met, and they said they met on Thursdays at Greenbriar. I told them that my father had been a Lion for many many years, and they asked if I'd ever been to a Lions Club meeting. I said I had and they smiled and invited me to visit their club. They make the rounds of community events, it sounded like - they told me what event they were working at next weekend, but I don't remember. This event supports scholarships for kids attending Atlanta Public Schools. Fire fighters - community volunteers - scholarships for kids to go to college - seems like a winner for the neighborhood.
This isn't one of the big 5K races - only a couple hundred people were registered, and with the beginning and ending of the race at the same place, the organizers didn't have that many people there to work the event. The runners went off a few minutes after 8:30 a.m., and then those of us who were waiting for runners to return had 16 minutes to wait for the first of them to cross the finish line. I helped put the orange cones in place that defined the lane the runners walked down, after crossing the finishing line, and put orange cones in place to keep traffic from turning on to the street from North Highland. (You never can tell what people will do. Someone pulled out of a driveway farther down Los Angeles while the runners were coming up the hill toward the finish line.)
Sometime after the runners left and before they started coming back, a man came over from the store across from the fire station on the other side of Los Angeles and told the yellow-vested Lions Club volunteer who was staffing the finish line that there were cars parked in the store's parking lot that shouldn't be there. She was very pleasant and said, "Go talk to them at the fire station." He said again that there were cars parked in their parking lot that shouldn't be there and that if people didn't move them immediately they would be towed. She smiled and said again, "Go talk to them at the fire station." So he left us and headed over to talk to one of the fire fighters.
I said to the woman in the yellow vest that if I had a retail business that just happened to be across the street from a fire station, and that fire station decided to sponsor an event to benefit children attending Atlanta Public Schools, I don't think my response to a few cars in my parking lot early in the morning would be to call a tow truck.
Iain came in with a time of 33 minutes and some seconds. Steve and I waited for him at the finish line and cheered for him when he crossed it. I walked back home at about 9:15; Steve and Iain stayed a little longer. At least by the time I left, no tow truck had arrived.
This isn't one of the big 5K races - only a couple hundred people were registered, and with the beginning and ending of the race at the same place, the organizers didn't have that many people there to work the event. The runners went off a few minutes after 8:30 a.m., and then those of us who were waiting for runners to return had 16 minutes to wait for the first of them to cross the finish line. I helped put the orange cones in place that defined the lane the runners walked down, after crossing the finishing line, and put orange cones in place to keep traffic from turning on to the street from North Highland. (You never can tell what people will do. Someone pulled out of a driveway farther down Los Angeles while the runners were coming up the hill toward the finish line.)
Sometime after the runners left and before they started coming back, a man came over from the store across from the fire station on the other side of Los Angeles and told the yellow-vested Lions Club volunteer who was staffing the finish line that there were cars parked in the store's parking lot that shouldn't be there. She was very pleasant and said, "Go talk to them at the fire station." He said again that there were cars parked in their parking lot that shouldn't be there and that if people didn't move them immediately they would be towed. She smiled and said again, "Go talk to them at the fire station." So he left us and headed over to talk to one of the fire fighters.
I said to the woman in the yellow vest that if I had a retail business that just happened to be across the street from a fire station, and that fire station decided to sponsor an event to benefit children attending Atlanta Public Schools, I don't think my response to a few cars in my parking lot early in the morning would be to call a tow truck.
Iain came in with a time of 33 minutes and some seconds. Steve and I waited for him at the finish line and cheered for him when he crossed it. I walked back home at about 9:15; Steve and Iain stayed a little longer. At least by the time I left, no tow truck had arrived.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Remembering September 11
Seven years ago today, Tom was with the kids at the dentist. He called me and told me that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I assumed an accident, and a little plane; he called back not long afterwards to say that a second plane had struck the other tower. It wasn't long afterwards that I remember seeing the first tower collapse, on the television screen in a conference room in my office building. I remember later hearing that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and someone in the office trying to call family in the state, and her fear, when her call did not go through. That night emailing an acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon (she was all right) and another whose office I thought was in lower Manhattan (he was all right too, although the offices were not).
I remember for a few days afterwards, the normally sullen, aggressive drivers among whom I have to make may way to work each day seemed a little less, well, sullen and aggressive. A little less likely to honk the horn for a moment's delay when the light turned green, a little more likely to let someone in who needed to change lanes. It only lasted a couple of days, though.
Before September 11, the newspapers had been full of lurid speculation about the congressman from California and a missing intern. I remember standing out in the street a few nights later, talking to my friend Carol, saying that I would be okay with being scared, as long as the public discourse sayed on to things that mattered instead of the kind of stuff that had been in play before.
Tom and I watched Charlie Wilson's War a couple of months ago, the story about how a Congressman from Texas got the U.S. Congress to support the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s. He could get Congress to appropriate ever increasing amounts to support the military action, but once the Soviets withdrew, there was no interest in building the schools that might have secured the peace. The movie ends with a great quote from Congressman Wilson, something to the effect that we won the war, and then we screwed everything up.
One of the books I am currently reading is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson tried to climb K2, didn't make it to the summit, and on his way back got lost. He ended up in a village that didn't have a school, and decided that he would come back and build one there. I have not gotten to the part of the book where he actually gets the school built, but on the back of the book it says that over the next decade Mortensen built 55 schools " - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban."
Greg Mortenson is still building schools. According to the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it costs "$1 a month for one child's education in Pakistan or Afghanistan, a penny to buy a pencil, and a teacher's salary averages $1 a day." Contributions go to the Central Asia Institute, http://www.ikat.org/, in Bozeman, Montana.
It's been seven years. This year, I think I will remember those events of seven years ago not by flying the flag or by a moment of silence for those who died when the planes crashed, but with my checkbook. If you want to, too, here's the address:
Central Asia Institute
P.O. Box 7209
Bozeman, MT 59771
Primary prevention is almost always best.
I remember for a few days afterwards, the normally sullen, aggressive drivers among whom I have to make may way to work each day seemed a little less, well, sullen and aggressive. A little less likely to honk the horn for a moment's delay when the light turned green, a little more likely to let someone in who needed to change lanes. It only lasted a couple of days, though.
Before September 11, the newspapers had been full of lurid speculation about the congressman from California and a missing intern. I remember standing out in the street a few nights later, talking to my friend Carol, saying that I would be okay with being scared, as long as the public discourse sayed on to things that mattered instead of the kind of stuff that had been in play before.
Tom and I watched Charlie Wilson's War a couple of months ago, the story about how a Congressman from Texas got the U.S. Congress to support the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s. He could get Congress to appropriate ever increasing amounts to support the military action, but once the Soviets withdrew, there was no interest in building the schools that might have secured the peace. The movie ends with a great quote from Congressman Wilson, something to the effect that we won the war, and then we screwed everything up.
One of the books I am currently reading is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson tried to climb K2, didn't make it to the summit, and on his way back got lost. He ended up in a village that didn't have a school, and decided that he would come back and build one there. I have not gotten to the part of the book where he actually gets the school built, but on the back of the book it says that over the next decade Mortensen built 55 schools " - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban."
Greg Mortenson is still building schools. According to the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it costs "$1 a month for one child's education in Pakistan or Afghanistan, a penny to buy a pencil, and a teacher's salary averages $1 a day." Contributions go to the Central Asia Institute, http://www.ikat.org/, in Bozeman, Montana.
It's been seven years. This year, I think I will remember those events of seven years ago not by flying the flag or by a moment of silence for those who died when the planes crashed, but with my checkbook. If you want to, too, here's the address:
Central Asia Institute
P.O. Box 7209
Bozeman, MT 59771
Primary prevention is almost always best.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Easy Ways to Save the Earth
Last night Tom and I heard Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who wrote The World is Flat, at the Atlanta International School. Mr. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, was just published. We bought the book and stood in line after the talk to get it signed, but I haven't started reading it yet. (This was the first book signing that I have ever attended where there were police officers there - we weren't that rowdy a crowd. Were they that concerned that people were going to cut in line?)
He gave a great talk. He talked about the big global trends - rapidly growing demand for energy around the world, climate change, oil-enriched dictatorships - that were shaping the future of our country and the rest of the world. It is very clear, he said, that we cannot drill our way out of this, nor can we conserve our way out - it will take radical change in policy to support a radical change in the economics of energy that could ultimately drive the innovation that could develop the new technology that is needed to solve the problem and lead the way to a future that is not dependent on us sending all our money to countries that hate us so we can burn their oil to power our country and destroy the planet.
He listed the book titles you can find on Google under "Easy Ways to Save the Earth" - there are a lot of them, and they are all wrong, because the things that need to be done are not going to be easy. They will be disruptive, painful, and scary. They will require focus and longterm vision and investment in the future that has been in short supply among the leadership of our country. What's needed is revolutionary change, not evolutionary change, and in revolutions, someone always gets hurt. Right now, all this talk about "green" is just rebranding; it's something the marketing people dreamed up. It's a party.
Which leads one to the obvious question, what can we do. The answer seemed to be get involved, demand that our country's leaders do a better job and actually address the real threats to our country. Of course, we have been replacing our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and I've got those cloth bags in the back of my car that I take with me to Kroger. I'll keep doing those things not because they are going to be the solution but because they will keep reminding me that we need a solution.
He gave a great talk. He talked about the big global trends - rapidly growing demand for energy around the world, climate change, oil-enriched dictatorships - that were shaping the future of our country and the rest of the world. It is very clear, he said, that we cannot drill our way out of this, nor can we conserve our way out - it will take radical change in policy to support a radical change in the economics of energy that could ultimately drive the innovation that could develop the new technology that is needed to solve the problem and lead the way to a future that is not dependent on us sending all our money to countries that hate us so we can burn their oil to power our country and destroy the planet.
He listed the book titles you can find on Google under "Easy Ways to Save the Earth" - there are a lot of them, and they are all wrong, because the things that need to be done are not going to be easy. They will be disruptive, painful, and scary. They will require focus and longterm vision and investment in the future that has been in short supply among the leadership of our country. What's needed is revolutionary change, not evolutionary change, and in revolutions, someone always gets hurt. Right now, all this talk about "green" is just rebranding; it's something the marketing people dreamed up. It's a party.
Which leads one to the obvious question, what can we do. The answer seemed to be get involved, demand that our country's leaders do a better job and actually address the real threats to our country. Of course, we have been replacing our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and I've got those cloth bags in the back of my car that I take with me to Kroger. I'll keep doing those things not because they are going to be the solution but because they will keep reminding me that we need a solution.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Neighborhood Basics
I moved to Wessyngton Road in 1989, and the only neighbors I knew at first were Kathy and Steve. Sometime after that - I don't know when - we started having neighborhood parties. I had nothing to do with organizing this; this was probably during the years when I had young children, and the ones doing the organizing did not. But I went, and I got to know them and the other women they invited. For years it was a women's thing - the guys never did anything (although there was one evening when Tom, Fernando, and Dan stood out in the street in front of our house drinking beer for several hours).
The women of Wessyngton Road still get together on a more or less regular basis. The ones who started it have moved away (Lindsey got married and now lives on some other street, and Todd and Charlotte sold their house to travel around the world, took the long way to Colorado and never made back to the eastern U.S.) but Lynsley, Kathy, Amy and I (+/-, depending on the occasion) have continued the tradition. A few years ago we started having block parties, inviting everyone on the street (flyers to every house, emails to everyone we have email addresses for) and the last couple of times I think we've had at least 30 people there. Every time I've met people I didn't know, and we've added a few new names to the neighborhood directory.
Last year Tom invited Mark, a fine guitarist who lives at the other end of the street, to bring his guitar, and the result was a nearly spontaneous emergence of guitars in the hands of guys from all up and down the street, and music that went on into the night (I know they were still there, that night, when I went to bed). This year there were fewer guys with guitars but it was still great. I love living in a neighborhood where guys will sit on lawnchairs and play guitars in a church parking lot. What could be better than that?
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times last summer about a guy who decided, after seemingly out of nowhere a neighbor murdered his wife and then himself, that he really wanted to know the people who lived in his neighborhood. He started asking his neighbors - people he barely knew - if he could come spend a night at their house. Many of the people he asked said "yes" and that was the beginning, it seems, of many friendships. (He's now writing a book about neighborhorhoods.) His column is still on the NY Times website:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23lovenheim.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
That strikes me as a little drastic; we're more a potluck/block party/baby shower/winter solstice-celebrating group on Wessyngton Road. There's lots of pet-sitting that goes on on the street, though. And the guys in the parking lot, playing guitar.
The women of Wessyngton Road still get together on a more or less regular basis. The ones who started it have moved away (Lindsey got married and now lives on some other street, and Todd and Charlotte sold their house to travel around the world, took the long way to Colorado and never made back to the eastern U.S.) but Lynsley, Kathy, Amy and I (+/-, depending on the occasion) have continued the tradition. A few years ago we started having block parties, inviting everyone on the street (flyers to every house, emails to everyone we have email addresses for) and the last couple of times I think we've had at least 30 people there. Every time I've met people I didn't know, and we've added a few new names to the neighborhood directory.
Last year Tom invited Mark, a fine guitarist who lives at the other end of the street, to bring his guitar, and the result was a nearly spontaneous emergence of guitars in the hands of guys from all up and down the street, and music that went on into the night (I know they were still there, that night, when I went to bed). This year there were fewer guys with guitars but it was still great. I love living in a neighborhood where guys will sit on lawnchairs and play guitars in a church parking lot. What could be better than that?
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times last summer about a guy who decided, after seemingly out of nowhere a neighbor murdered his wife and then himself, that he really wanted to know the people who lived in his neighborhood. He started asking his neighbors - people he barely knew - if he could come spend a night at their house. Many of the people he asked said "yes" and that was the beginning, it seems, of many friendships. (He's now writing a book about neighborhorhoods.) His column is still on the NY Times website:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23lovenheim.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
That strikes me as a little drastic; we're more a potluck/block party/baby shower/winter solstice-celebrating group on Wessyngton Road. There's lots of pet-sitting that goes on on the street, though. And the guys in the parking lot, playing guitar.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Mothers' March, 2008
A couple months ago I got a call from the March of Dimes, asking me if I would be a Mothers' March coordinator, sending their fundraising letters to some of my neighbors. I did this for the March of Dimes a couple of years ago, and was supposed to last year (but I will confess I think I never got my letters sent). So I said yes. I support the March of Dimes for several reasons, most importantly because of the critical role they played decades ago when they were still the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in supporting development of polio vaccine. That was a different era, when people were terrified of the annual summer epidemics of polio; when ambulances came to summer camps at night to take away the children who were striken during the daytime; when fearful parents would not let their children go to swimming pools. On April 12, 1955, when the results of the Frances Field Trial were released, demonstrating that the Salk vaccine was effective, the bells rang on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
Since then, they've gotten more involved in prenatal and infant health issues, with campaigns to prevent prematurity and birth defects. These are really important issues and the March of Dimes continues to support important work; I suppose they are having the same challenges that all nonprofit organizations have, to stay fresh and compelling in the cacophony of competing priorities that we all face every day, to stay relevant, to stay current with how people see themselves and their world.
Which brings me to the Mothers' March. In the early days of the March of Dimes mothers really did walk the neighborhood, collecting spare change. David Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history "Polio: An American Story" spoke at Emory last year and talked about how his mother was a Mothers' March block captain. Since no one wanted to knock on doors and ask people for donations who didn't want to donate, the custom was to leave your porch light on if you were willing to have the Mothers' March volunteer come by. But the Oshinskys lived in an apartment building, and the apartments didn't have porch lights, so people would leave their shoes outside their door if they were willing to have someone come by.
Now, you don't have go door to door, you can do it all by snail mail. The March of Dimes sent me a list of names and addresses (many of which are out of date), preprinted cards, two sets of envelopes (one to mail the card, one for my neighbor to mail their check back), and some larger envelopes to mail everything back to the March of Dimes. When I did this two years ago, I wrote a letter which I mailed to my neighbors, and yesterday morning I went to the Post Office and bought stamps. But it doesn't feel right.
I know almost all the people on this list. They may or may not be readers of this blog. They are all invited to our neighborhood block parties, and most of them come. And the only time I have ever sent anything to most of them in the mail was two years ago, when I did the Mothers' March before.
So here's what I think I'll do. I'll email them the URL for this entry, and I'll take the envelopes door to door. I'll write something for the few people for whom I don't have email addresses, and I'll deliver them in person. If people what to donate something, I'll tell them to bring it to my house, or let me know and I'll send one of my kids to pick it up.
It's the Mothers' March. No need to turn on the porch light or leave your shoes out - I'll be by. See you soon.
Since then, they've gotten more involved in prenatal and infant health issues, with campaigns to prevent prematurity and birth defects. These are really important issues and the March of Dimes continues to support important work; I suppose they are having the same challenges that all nonprofit organizations have, to stay fresh and compelling in the cacophony of competing priorities that we all face every day, to stay relevant, to stay current with how people see themselves and their world.
Which brings me to the Mothers' March. In the early days of the March of Dimes mothers really did walk the neighborhood, collecting spare change. David Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history "Polio: An American Story" spoke at Emory last year and talked about how his mother was a Mothers' March block captain. Since no one wanted to knock on doors and ask people for donations who didn't want to donate, the custom was to leave your porch light on if you were willing to have the Mothers' March volunteer come by. But the Oshinskys lived in an apartment building, and the apartments didn't have porch lights, so people would leave their shoes outside their door if they were willing to have someone come by.
Now, you don't have go door to door, you can do it all by snail mail. The March of Dimes sent me a list of names and addresses (many of which are out of date), preprinted cards, two sets of envelopes (one to mail the card, one for my neighbor to mail their check back), and some larger envelopes to mail everything back to the March of Dimes. When I did this two years ago, I wrote a letter which I mailed to my neighbors, and yesterday morning I went to the Post Office and bought stamps. But it doesn't feel right.
I know almost all the people on this list. They may or may not be readers of this blog. They are all invited to our neighborhood block parties, and most of them come. And the only time I have ever sent anything to most of them in the mail was two years ago, when I did the Mothers' March before.
So here's what I think I'll do. I'll email them the URL for this entry, and I'll take the envelopes door to door. I'll write something for the few people for whom I don't have email addresses, and I'll deliver them in person. If people what to donate something, I'll tell them to bring it to my house, or let me know and I'll send one of my kids to pick it up.
It's the Mothers' March. No need to turn on the porch light or leave your shoes out - I'll be by. See you soon.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
New School Zones Released by APS
I couldn't find the new school zones last night, possibly because I was looking in the wrong place; I was checking the rezoning page, but this morning there's a link on the home page:
http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/Morningside-lin.pdf
with questions and answers here:
http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/FAQMorningside-lin.pdf
Because my youngest child is in 5th grade this year, and we live so close to Morningside Elementary, I have not been as anxious as others have been, but the new school zones are astonishing - the entire Virginia-Highlands neighborhood, south of Amsterdam Avenue, is going to the new school. I probably should have seen this coming, but I didn't. Morningside Elementary School, without our neighbors from Virginia Highlands? The new school will initially open with kindergarten through grade 4, so the kids who will be in 5th grade next year will not have to change to the new school.
There will be a Community meeting at Grady High School at 6 p.m. on September 18, and then it goes to the school board for a decision on October 6.
According to the materials APS has posted, if we were using these zones now, Morningside Elementary would be smaller by about 1/3, down to just over 600 students. (I started to say something about head lice but thought better of it.)
Stay tuned. I think things are about to get lively.
http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/Morningside-lin.pdf
with questions and answers here:
http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/FAQMorningside-lin.pdf
Because my youngest child is in 5th grade this year, and we live so close to Morningside Elementary, I have not been as anxious as others have been, but the new school zones are astonishing - the entire Virginia-Highlands neighborhood, south of Amsterdam Avenue, is going to the new school. I probably should have seen this coming, but I didn't. Morningside Elementary School, without our neighbors from Virginia Highlands? The new school will initially open with kindergarten through grade 4, so the kids who will be in 5th grade next year will not have to change to the new school.
There will be a Community meeting at Grady High School at 6 p.m. on September 18, and then it goes to the school board for a decision on October 6.
According to the materials APS has posted, if we were using these zones now, Morningside Elementary would be smaller by about 1/3, down to just over 600 students. (I started to say something about head lice but thought better of it.)
Stay tuned. I think things are about to get lively.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
The Road to Freedom
I took the day off today and Tom and I went to the High Museum; the Louvre exhibit is about to close, and it was nice, but I wanted to see the exhibit about the Civil Rights movement, "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968," on display through October 5.
Some of the photographers are famous, some are anonymous. But the events they captured - and shaped - are seered into the history of America in the 20th century like a scar. I didn't know the stories about the Freedom Riders, brave groups who rode buses into the South, to unmask the segregation that still existed in interstate travel, and how the first group was nearly killed by a mob outside Anniston, Alabama. There were other stories I did know - the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, in 1957; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963; the murders of the civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964; the brutal attack of the demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965; the murder of Martin Luther King and the violence that followed, in 1968. Some of the pictures portrayed an Atlanta that Tom remembered from his childhood, and one portrayed an incident for which he was a near witness.
The photographers who captured these images - images of bravery, of dignity, and of struggle - were (intentionally or not) part of the history they were documenting. The images were so powerful that Kennedy and later Johnson could not ignore what was happening, nor could the rest of America. Two of the photographers are interviewed in a video that is on display as part of the exhibition; one of them explains that what was happening was just so wrong based everything he had learned from his father, growing up, that he just had to do something. Photographs are powerful. And some of the photographs in this exhibit changed history.
There is a picture of a young black girl who was part of the group that desegregated Central High School. A mob of young people - her peers, kids her age - screams at her. The faces of two white girls with their perfect upward flipped hair were contorted with what I can only describe as hatred. I pointed them out to Tom. Do they know that people like me look at these pictures? How do they remember what they did back then? Are they ashamed? Have they grown up into people who recognize that they were on the wrong side? How do they describe it to their children and grandchildren? Tom (who is both more cynical and more Southern than I am) said he thought they were probably proud of what they did.
I don't think so. As humans, we have a nearly overwhelming need to think well of ourselves, and the things we remember and forget determine that internal image of ourselves. These girls are now women in their 60s, and I bet they don't remember being in that mob that day. For when memories are too painful, the road to freedom is forgetting.
This is a time in our history that we should not forget. The exhibit is there through October 5. Go see it.
Some of the photographers are famous, some are anonymous. But the events they captured - and shaped - are seered into the history of America in the 20th century like a scar. I didn't know the stories about the Freedom Riders, brave groups who rode buses into the South, to unmask the segregation that still existed in interstate travel, and how the first group was nearly killed by a mob outside Anniston, Alabama. There were other stories I did know - the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, in 1957; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963; the murders of the civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964; the brutal attack of the demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965; the murder of Martin Luther King and the violence that followed, in 1968. Some of the pictures portrayed an Atlanta that Tom remembered from his childhood, and one portrayed an incident for which he was a near witness.
The photographers who captured these images - images of bravery, of dignity, and of struggle - were (intentionally or not) part of the history they were documenting. The images were so powerful that Kennedy and later Johnson could not ignore what was happening, nor could the rest of America. Two of the photographers are interviewed in a video that is on display as part of the exhibition; one of them explains that what was happening was just so wrong based everything he had learned from his father, growing up, that he just had to do something. Photographs are powerful. And some of the photographs in this exhibit changed history.
There is a picture of a young black girl who was part of the group that desegregated Central High School. A mob of young people - her peers, kids her age - screams at her. The faces of two white girls with their perfect upward flipped hair were contorted with what I can only describe as hatred. I pointed them out to Tom. Do they know that people like me look at these pictures? How do they remember what they did back then? Are they ashamed? Have they grown up into people who recognize that they were on the wrong side? How do they describe it to their children and grandchildren? Tom (who is both more cynical and more Southern than I am) said he thought they were probably proud of what they did.
I don't think so. As humans, we have a nearly overwhelming need to think well of ourselves, and the things we remember and forget determine that internal image of ourselves. These girls are now women in their 60s, and I bet they don't remember being in that mob that day. For when memories are too painful, the road to freedom is forgetting.
This is a time in our history that we should not forget. The exhibit is there through October 5. Go see it.
Speeding through Morningside
We have a problem with cars speeding through our neighborhood. Some of it is drivers trying to shave a few seconds off a trip by avoiding the light at Morningside and Highland; sometimes they are avoiding utility work on Morningside (when they were working on Highland, the Coldwell-Banker outdoor sign said "Whatever they are digging for, we hope they find it soon"); sometimes it's just our neighbors driving too fast. Wessyngton Road is wider than some of the older streets in the neighborhood and even when there are cars parked on both sides of the street it still feels like the wide open spaces, at least compared to other streets in Morningside.
Our neighbor Tim requested a traffic study, to see if we would qualify for speed bumps. They did the study and we failed - no speed bumps for us. In the absence of help from the city, we are on our own. I personally have been known to relocate fallen tree branches to make them easier for the city to find when they come round to pick them up. For a while we had natural inverted speed bumps (also known as potholes), which did tend to slow down the traffic, but with the regular digging up of the street and frequent repaving, the street is now smooth enough for roller skating. Tom and Dan had discussed in the past creating some potholes, when it seemed like there weren't enough to be effective, but as far as I know they never did it. As far as I know.
PEDS (http://www.peds.org/) is a local advocacy group that works on pedestrian safety and accessibility issues. I don't know if they get the credit for it or not, but those "State Law Requires Drivers to Stop for Pedestrians in Crosswalks" signs that are at many of the crosswalks in the neighborhood now at least are a visible reminder to drivers to stop for pedestrians.
And of course, enforcement would be nice. Lack of enforcement tempts otherwise Law-Abiding Citizens to Take the Law into Their Own Hands. There are stories of flung objects - coffee-cups, usually, but also those ubiquitous blue plastic bags (you know the ones). If the car gets close enough to you that you can touch it, it seems like you should be able to defend yourself. We were walking to the Virginia-Highlands SummerFest last year, and a car didn't stop for us in the crosswalk. Tom felt the need to get the driver's attention and kicked the car. This was witnessed by an Atlanta police officer who seemed more concerned about the state-law-violating car (not damaged) than the narrowly averted pedestrian casualties (us). This was last year; maybe it's better now.
PEDS has a nice flyer on their website about how to take action against neighborhood speeding (http://www.peds.org/pdf/Slow_Down_Flyer.pdf). According to them, if hit by a vehicle travelling 20 miles per hour, 9 out of 10 pedestrians will survive. It goes down to 5 out of 10 at 30 miles per hour and 1 out of 10 at 40 miles per hour. The speed limit in our neighborhood is 25 miles per hour. The flyer lists 9 things we can all do slow down the cars in our neighborhoods; tearing up the street is not among the recommended solutions, but one thing they suggest is using a radar gun to monitor speed. They have one that can be borrowed, or they say that one can be purchased for less than $100. I told Tom I wanted one for Christmas. (He said I could probably just point a hairdryer at the cars and it would have the same effect. Sounds like a good experiment.)
When Caroline was born, there were no other kids on our street; now, there are lots of them, including several that are still in diapers and more on the way. The demographic shifts in the neighborhood are dramatic, and of course that's why they are building a new elementary school nearby (the new school zone for which is not yet on the APS website - at least not at the URL that was sent out last week). There are skateboarders and bicycles and rollerbladers in our street. There are runners and joggers and walkers. There are people with dogs and people with strollers. And every car that comes down our street too fast potentially puts people that I love in danger.
Any ideas?
Our neighbor Tim requested a traffic study, to see if we would qualify for speed bumps. They did the study and we failed - no speed bumps for us. In the absence of help from the city, we are on our own. I personally have been known to relocate fallen tree branches to make them easier for the city to find when they come round to pick them up. For a while we had natural inverted speed bumps (also known as potholes), which did tend to slow down the traffic, but with the regular digging up of the street and frequent repaving, the street is now smooth enough for roller skating. Tom and Dan had discussed in the past creating some potholes, when it seemed like there weren't enough to be effective, but as far as I know they never did it. As far as I know.
PEDS (http://www.peds.org/) is a local advocacy group that works on pedestrian safety and accessibility issues. I don't know if they get the credit for it or not, but those "State Law Requires Drivers to Stop for Pedestrians in Crosswalks" signs that are at many of the crosswalks in the neighborhood now at least are a visible reminder to drivers to stop for pedestrians.
And of course, enforcement would be nice. Lack of enforcement tempts otherwise Law-Abiding Citizens to Take the Law into Their Own Hands. There are stories of flung objects - coffee-cups, usually, but also those ubiquitous blue plastic bags (you know the ones). If the car gets close enough to you that you can touch it, it seems like you should be able to defend yourself. We were walking to the Virginia-Highlands SummerFest last year, and a car didn't stop for us in the crosswalk. Tom felt the need to get the driver's attention and kicked the car. This was witnessed by an Atlanta police officer who seemed more concerned about the state-law-violating car (not damaged) than the narrowly averted pedestrian casualties (us). This was last year; maybe it's better now.
PEDS has a nice flyer on their website about how to take action against neighborhood speeding (http://www.peds.org/pdf/Slow_Down_Flyer.pdf). According to them, if hit by a vehicle travelling 20 miles per hour, 9 out of 10 pedestrians will survive. It goes down to 5 out of 10 at 30 miles per hour and 1 out of 10 at 40 miles per hour. The speed limit in our neighborhood is 25 miles per hour. The flyer lists 9 things we can all do slow down the cars in our neighborhoods; tearing up the street is not among the recommended solutions, but one thing they suggest is using a radar gun to monitor speed. They have one that can be borrowed, or they say that one can be purchased for less than $100. I told Tom I wanted one for Christmas. (He said I could probably just point a hairdryer at the cars and it would have the same effect. Sounds like a good experiment.)
When Caroline was born, there were no other kids on our street; now, there are lots of them, including several that are still in diapers and more on the way. The demographic shifts in the neighborhood are dramatic, and of course that's why they are building a new elementary school nearby (the new school zone for which is not yet on the APS website - at least not at the URL that was sent out last week). There are skateboarders and bicycles and rollerbladers in our street. There are runners and joggers and walkers. There are people with dogs and people with strollers. And every car that comes down our street too fast potentially puts people that I love in danger.
Any ideas?
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Urban Wildlife (Part 1)
Yesterday Tom and I went to the Target on North Druid Hills. We were surprised to see on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the parking lots for Arby's and Target about 20 Canadian geese. They were walking around and pecking at the ground. I parked about 30 feet from one of the clusters of geese, and Tom said, "Do you think you should park here?" Some of the geese were walking toward us (looking for a handout? they should know that aggressive panhandling is illegal in Atlanta - but maybe that's just downtown) but then they kept their distance. Were they park geese that went on a Labor Day flight and couldn't find their way back to the park? On their way south, but stuck in Atlanta due travel delays from Hurricane Gustav? I told Tom I was afraid someone would snatch one of them and have goose for dinner. He said that's illegal. Well, so's panhandling - or at least "aggressive panhandling."
Last year I saw baby geese along the edge of Peachtree Creek near Buford Highway. I was simultaneously delighted (it's fun to see baby geese) and alarmed (neither Peachtree Creek nor Buford Highway would seem to be a safe neighborhood for geese). But they have to live somewhere, and after all, around here we have covered most of the landscape with asphalt.
So I hope they made their way to wherever they were going, and that none of them ended up on someone's dinner table.
Last year I saw baby geese along the edge of Peachtree Creek near Buford Highway. I was simultaneously delighted (it's fun to see baby geese) and alarmed (neither Peachtree Creek nor Buford Highway would seem to be a safe neighborhood for geese). But they have to live somewhere, and after all, around here we have covered most of the landscape with asphalt.
So I hope they made their way to wherever they were going, and that none of them ended up on someone's dinner table.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Man on Wire
We went to Boston the week before school started - Freedom Trail, Museum of Science, New England Aquarium, whale watching, Harvard tour - the whole deal. The last night we were there we went to see "Man on Wire," which had just opened in theaters. This is a wonderful film about Philippe Petit's daring bid to string a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center. With a motley crew of accomplices, he succeeded in getting the cable across the sky and early in the morning on August 7, 1994, spent almost an hour suspended over lower Manhattan, in turn walking, dancing, and reclining, up so high he could barely be seen from street level.
Petit recounted how at age 17 he had read an article in a magazine about the World Trade Center, not yet built, and how from that moment he was obsessed with walking between the two towers. It took years of planning, but he finally did do it; had we not known how the story ended (the still-living Petit tells the story in the movie) it would have been a very frightening story. His friends talked about how they feared for Petit's life, how they were afraid he would not survive - and how they helped him do it anyway.
It is a wonderful film, in part because it doesn't end quite the way one expects - Petit does succeed in walking the wire between the towers, but in the aftermath loses friends and a lover. We expected a happy ending, but it didn't really have one.
During the movie, Tom's cell phone rang. He didn't take the call, but as we were leaving the theater, walking back to the T station, he returned the call; it was Amy's brother-in-law, with the news that our friend Dan had died that day in a motorcycle accident in Montana. Tom and Iain had visited him in Florida just before he left.
Dan was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, and then was an engineer with AT&T for more than 30 years. He was an accomplished athlete - he ran marathons, and had competed in whitewater events at the national level. He flew airplanes and he had jumped out of them (including on his first date with Amy). He raced cars and had a livelong love for motorcycles. After he retired, he had a second career as a motorsports writer and photographer.
Sarah picked up a "Man on Wire" postcard at Movies Worth Seeing after we got back home; it's now on the refrigerator. Seeing it there, the other morning Tom said that he couldn't think about the movie without thinking about Dan, and getting the sad news of his death. I told him I felt the same way, but that it seemed somehow fitting - Dan lived his life fully and he too was in his own way a man on wire.
And the endings? Well, they aren't always happy.
Petit recounted how at age 17 he had read an article in a magazine about the World Trade Center, not yet built, and how from that moment he was obsessed with walking between the two towers. It took years of planning, but he finally did do it; had we not known how the story ended (the still-living Petit tells the story in the movie) it would have been a very frightening story. His friends talked about how they feared for Petit's life, how they were afraid he would not survive - and how they helped him do it anyway.
It is a wonderful film, in part because it doesn't end quite the way one expects - Petit does succeed in walking the wire between the towers, but in the aftermath loses friends and a lover. We expected a happy ending, but it didn't really have one.
During the movie, Tom's cell phone rang. He didn't take the call, but as we were leaving the theater, walking back to the T station, he returned the call; it was Amy's brother-in-law, with the news that our friend Dan had died that day in a motorcycle accident in Montana. Tom and Iain had visited him in Florida just before he left.
Dan was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, and then was an engineer with AT&T for more than 30 years. He was an accomplished athlete - he ran marathons, and had competed in whitewater events at the national level. He flew airplanes and he had jumped out of them (including on his first date with Amy). He raced cars and had a livelong love for motorcycles. After he retired, he had a second career as a motorsports writer and photographer.
Sarah picked up a "Man on Wire" postcard at Movies Worth Seeing after we got back home; it's now on the refrigerator. Seeing it there, the other morning Tom said that he couldn't think about the movie without thinking about Dan, and getting the sad news of his death. I told him I felt the same way, but that it seemed somehow fitting - Dan lived his life fully and he too was in his own way a man on wire.
And the endings? Well, they aren't always happy.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Coffee with the Principal
Tom and I went to the coffee with the principal at Morningside Elementary this morning. The big news is that Becky is expecting the new school zones to be posted on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) website today -- or if not today, no later than Tuesday. Because of growth in enrollment at Morningside and other nearby elementary schools, a new school is being built on Ponce de Leon, where the Morningside kindergarten campus currently is. She said that she expects that APS will convene a Community Meeting about three weeks after the new school zones are released, and then after getting that public input APS will develop a final proposal that will go to the school board for a vote.
She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.
Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.
I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.
Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.
Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."
I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.
ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).
She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.
Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.
I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.
Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.
Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."
I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.
ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wessyngton Road & the Bermuda Triangle
A while back the old Mr. Coffee died. It was made of black plastic and we had had it for a long time. Tom got a recommendation from David for a an on-line place that sold coffeemakers, and so I looked at what they had and picked out a diecast stainless steel KitchenAid ProLine model that had gotten pretty good reviews. It also sounded like it was very substantially built and that is a desirable feature in our household. So even though it cost probably 10 times as much as its predecessor, it looked like it would be a good one and I ordered it.
The really big box came a few days later, and we unpacked it, and this coffeemaker was - well, it was very large. That's okay. So it didn't fit under the counter. It didn't need to fit under the counter. We put it all together and Tom made a pot of coffee. It was perfectly fine coffee. This was going to be okay.
But then the next time we put water in it, the "on" light came on, but then it switched off; after brief deliberation the machine had evaluated the situation, decided there was no water inside, and turned itself off. There was nothing we could do to convince it that we were not the kind of people who would try to make coffee without putting water in the coffeemaker (well, not very often anyway) so we eventually concluded it had a bad sensor and called the on-line place about a return. They told us we had to do that through KitchenAid, so we called them, and they sent us a new one. We packed up the old one in the box the new one came it and left it in the front room awaiting Federal Express pick-up.
The second one was just like the first one, large and heavy, with a glowing blue "on" light just like its predecessor. (There actually are three blue lights and two knobs across the top - there's the "on" indicator, a blue-illuminated digital clock/timer, and another light that indicated how long the coffee had been sitting there. Given our difficulty with actually making coffee up to this point, we possibly had not noticed this third light.) It also was just like the first one, in that after we ran one pot of water through it to clean it out it would shut off every time we turned it on.
We couldn't believe it. Was it our aura? Did we live in some kind of Bermuda Triangle for coffeemakers? Tom thought it might be a bad batch of microcontrollers. He called the on-line place we had purchased it from and said we were returning it and wanted our money back. We now had two extremely large, heavy diecast stainless steel virtually indestructible coffeemakers, neither of which actually made coffee. We were concerned at that point about having them both in the house; we thought they might reproduce.
So then we were at Caramba one evening, drinking Margaritas and discussing the competing theories (aura/Bermuda Triangle/bad batch) and Tom came up with a fourth one. The electrical conductivity of the water in Atlanta is extremely low. What if the water level sensor was somehow dependent on being able to send some electricity through the water? (The only city water with lower conductivity than Atlanta's is New York City. Of course, the only people in New York City with kitchens big enough for this coffeemaker probably have servants to make their coffee and have no idea if the coffeemaker works or not.) So when we got home, we put a pinch of salt in the water reservoir (it was full of water, since dumping it out into the sink was hard, given the weight of the thing) and turned it on. The blue light went on, and then it turned itself off. So much for that idea.
But the next morning, it did work, and it made a perfectly fine pot of coffee. It might be that the next time it didn't work, but the time after that it did, and it has every time since. For a while I was putting a few grains of salt in each pot of water, but I called KitchenAid to try to find out if this made any sense at all. The first time I called it was clear that discussions of the conductivity of water were not in the service person's script book and she really didn't want to talk to me. When I called the second time (FedEx had not yet shown up to pick up the first one) that person was more interested but still couldn't tell me if the conductivity of the water had anything to do with how the sensor worked.
So we still have the coffee maker. We named it/him WALL-E after the robot in the movie, to which it/he bears a certain resemblance. Every morning I get up and turn the knob to the right, and the blue light comes on and stays on, and he makes me a very nice pot of coffee.
This is all true. I could not make this up if I tried.
The really big box came a few days later, and we unpacked it, and this coffeemaker was - well, it was very large. That's okay. So it didn't fit under the counter. It didn't need to fit under the counter. We put it all together and Tom made a pot of coffee. It was perfectly fine coffee. This was going to be okay.
But then the next time we put water in it, the "on" light came on, but then it switched off; after brief deliberation the machine had evaluated the situation, decided there was no water inside, and turned itself off. There was nothing we could do to convince it that we were not the kind of people who would try to make coffee without putting water in the coffeemaker (well, not very often anyway) so we eventually concluded it had a bad sensor and called the on-line place about a return. They told us we had to do that through KitchenAid, so we called them, and they sent us a new one. We packed up the old one in the box the new one came it and left it in the front room awaiting Federal Express pick-up.
The second one was just like the first one, large and heavy, with a glowing blue "on" light just like its predecessor. (There actually are three blue lights and two knobs across the top - there's the "on" indicator, a blue-illuminated digital clock/timer, and another light that indicated how long the coffee had been sitting there. Given our difficulty with actually making coffee up to this point, we possibly had not noticed this third light.) It also was just like the first one, in that after we ran one pot of water through it to clean it out it would shut off every time we turned it on.
We couldn't believe it. Was it our aura? Did we live in some kind of Bermuda Triangle for coffeemakers? Tom thought it might be a bad batch of microcontrollers. He called the on-line place we had purchased it from and said we were returning it and wanted our money back. We now had two extremely large, heavy diecast stainless steel virtually indestructible coffeemakers, neither of which actually made coffee. We were concerned at that point about having them both in the house; we thought they might reproduce.
So then we were at Caramba one evening, drinking Margaritas and discussing the competing theories (aura/Bermuda Triangle/bad batch) and Tom came up with a fourth one. The electrical conductivity of the water in Atlanta is extremely low. What if the water level sensor was somehow dependent on being able to send some electricity through the water? (The only city water with lower conductivity than Atlanta's is New York City. Of course, the only people in New York City with kitchens big enough for this coffeemaker probably have servants to make their coffee and have no idea if the coffeemaker works or not.) So when we got home, we put a pinch of salt in the water reservoir (it was full of water, since dumping it out into the sink was hard, given the weight of the thing) and turned it on. The blue light went on, and then it turned itself off. So much for that idea.
But the next morning, it did work, and it made a perfectly fine pot of coffee. It might be that the next time it didn't work, but the time after that it did, and it has every time since. For a while I was putting a few grains of salt in each pot of water, but I called KitchenAid to try to find out if this made any sense at all. The first time I called it was clear that discussions of the conductivity of water were not in the service person's script book and she really didn't want to talk to me. When I called the second time (FedEx had not yet shown up to pick up the first one) that person was more interested but still couldn't tell me if the conductivity of the water had anything to do with how the sensor worked.
So we still have the coffee maker. We named it/him WALL-E after the robot in the movie, to which it/he bears a certain resemblance. Every morning I get up and turn the knob to the right, and the blue light comes on and stays on, and he makes me a very nice pot of coffee.
This is all true. I could not make this up if I tried.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Missing caterpillars
For years, a ritual of summer has been looking for caterpillars on the fennel plants in Kathy and Steve's front yard. They are green, black, and white, and eventually make light green chrysalises. After a week or two the chrysalis becomes almost translucent and a damp and crumpled swallowtail butterfly emerges. We have had caterpillars in jars, fed with fennel until they metamorphed into butterflies, and then we would release them and watch them fly away. But mostly we have looked out for the caterpillars, looked for the chrysalises old and new, and kept track of their comings and goings. Every year by August they were plentiful, with young small ones and middle-sized ones and big ones that had assumed the distinctive comma shape, that meant they were about to be encased temporarily in a chrysalis while a miracle happened.
Until this year. Is the heat, or the drought, or global warming? Hungry birds? Habitat loss somewhere else? Whatever the reason, I have not been able to find a single caterpillar on Kathy and Steve's fennel. Every few days I look, and the caterpillars are not there.
Whatever the cause, this seems to me to be a bad sign. I don't know what critical role swallowtail butterflies play in the great scheme of things, but does this mean something really important is not going to happen? Perhaps they will be back next year.
There is that wonderful Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder." (Confession: I did not remember the title, but "Ray Bradbury butterfly time travel" typed into Google retrieved what my memory could not.) A time traveler going back into the past is warned not to change anything, and when he comes back to his present, it's not the same as when he left. On the sole of his shoe, he finds a crushed butterfly.
Perhaps they will be back next year.
Until this year. Is the heat, or the drought, or global warming? Hungry birds? Habitat loss somewhere else? Whatever the reason, I have not been able to find a single caterpillar on Kathy and Steve's fennel. Every few days I look, and the caterpillars are not there.
Whatever the cause, this seems to me to be a bad sign. I don't know what critical role swallowtail butterflies play in the great scheme of things, but does this mean something really important is not going to happen? Perhaps they will be back next year.
There is that wonderful Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder." (Confession: I did not remember the title, but "Ray Bradbury butterfly time travel" typed into Google retrieved what my memory could not.) A time traveler going back into the past is warned not to change anything, and when he comes back to his present, it's not the same as when he left. On the sole of his shoe, he finds a crushed butterfly.
Perhaps they will be back next year.
Rats!
Honestly, I didn't start this blog to only write about pest control, but this follows logically from the first posting about the possum in the living room.
A week or two ago we were having dinner with David and Alka, and they mentioned driving by a place "that sounded really scary" - and we recognized it right away as one of Tom's favorites - "Do-It-Yourself Pest Control" (that really is the name of it - it's on Chamblee Tucker Road).
There is - let us be frank here - a rat issue in the neighborhood. We used to have a cat, but then we got the dog and the cat moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve, who did not have a dog, and then later the cat died. So we no longer have an effective natural predator of small rodents patrolling the perimeter of our house. At around the same time a house on an adjacent street (not Wessyngton Road) was knocked down to make way for a Large House that is Architecturally Dissimilar from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH). The neighborhood rumor is that the house that was knocked down was infested with rats. So the rats, now homeless, went Searching for New Homes and some of them decided that they wanted to live at our house.
Now it's not that we didn't already have rats - we did. Sarah has two rats that live in a cage in the upstairs bathroom. (Actually for several days one of them was living behind the washing machine, but that's another story.) But these are actual pet rats, obtained from people who make you wash your hands before you handle rats as opposed to washing them after you handle them, not the more independent ones who are accustomed to making their own way in the world.
So Tom went to visit the guys at Do-It-Yourself Pest Control, and got some traps. We never caught a rat in the traps, and as the nocturnal visitations went on there seemed some danger that the rats would get comfortable, move in, bring their friends, and generally not be good neighbors - and perhaps even chew through the insulation on some wire and burn the house down. So we knew we needed to move on to more desperate measures - either getting another cat (who might not distinguish between the various rats potentially available for catching) or poison. The guys at Do-It-Yourself didn't have cats but they did talk to Tom about poison, and I have to say the results were pretty stunning.
The poison looks like azalea food but comes in big chunks which are put in the same black plastic boxes that housed the traps. We lost a couple of the boxes (raccoons, we are guessing) but have seen no non-resident rats in the house since Tom put the poison out.
Of course rat control is most effective if implemented at the neighborhood level. We have a couple of LHADAHs on our street, one of which is under construction, and one of which is completed and currently for sale. Anyone who is thinking about paying $1.3M for a house....well, don't you think they should know? Full disclosure and all.
A week or two ago we were having dinner with David and Alka, and they mentioned driving by a place "that sounded really scary" - and we recognized it right away as one of Tom's favorites - "Do-It-Yourself Pest Control" (that really is the name of it - it's on Chamblee Tucker Road).
There is - let us be frank here - a rat issue in the neighborhood. We used to have a cat, but then we got the dog and the cat moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve, who did not have a dog, and then later the cat died. So we no longer have an effective natural predator of small rodents patrolling the perimeter of our house. At around the same time a house on an adjacent street (not Wessyngton Road) was knocked down to make way for a Large House that is Architecturally Dissimilar from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH). The neighborhood rumor is that the house that was knocked down was infested with rats. So the rats, now homeless, went Searching for New Homes and some of them decided that they wanted to live at our house.
Now it's not that we didn't already have rats - we did. Sarah has two rats that live in a cage in the upstairs bathroom. (Actually for several days one of them was living behind the washing machine, but that's another story.) But these are actual pet rats, obtained from people who make you wash your hands before you handle rats as opposed to washing them after you handle them, not the more independent ones who are accustomed to making their own way in the world.
So Tom went to visit the guys at Do-It-Yourself Pest Control, and got some traps. We never caught a rat in the traps, and as the nocturnal visitations went on there seemed some danger that the rats would get comfortable, move in, bring their friends, and generally not be good neighbors - and perhaps even chew through the insulation on some wire and burn the house down. So we knew we needed to move on to more desperate measures - either getting another cat (who might not distinguish between the various rats potentially available for catching) or poison. The guys at Do-It-Yourself didn't have cats but they did talk to Tom about poison, and I have to say the results were pretty stunning.
The poison looks like azalea food but comes in big chunks which are put in the same black plastic boxes that housed the traps. We lost a couple of the boxes (raccoons, we are guessing) but have seen no non-resident rats in the house since Tom put the poison out.
Of course rat control is most effective if implemented at the neighborhood level. We have a couple of LHADAHs on our street, one of which is under construction, and one of which is completed and currently for sale. Anyone who is thinking about paying $1.3M for a house....well, don't you think they should know? Full disclosure and all.
Possum Fritters
Sunday night when Tom and I got back from walking the dog, we found Sarah standing on the chair in front of the computer in the living room. (Since this chair has wheels on it, this seemed like a particularly bad idea.) She thought she had seen a small gray animal make its way across the living room toward her - perhaps a rat, maybe a possum. Bullwinkle, the black lab, was not going to be helpful so I put him in his crate in the other room even though he was wet from the rain, and Tom and the girls started looking for the small gray animal.
It seemed most likely that it was behind the sofa (this would be the sofa that I bought when I was an intern that has been subsequently been destroyed by the cumulative effect of multiple moving companies, three children, and especially the aforementioned Labrador retriever), so Tom looked behind it and didn't see it at first. I went to return Bullwinkle's second blanket (since he was wet) to his crate, but once I opened the door he was out, and the hall door wasn't closed, so Bullwinkle was back in the living room. In the meantime, Tom had spotted it but with the dog back in the room no telling where it had gone.
We turned the sofa over (no animal) but ultimately got it under a blanket and then into a wire wastebasket. It was a young possum, doing its best to look fierce, with its mouth open and hair on end (I told Sarah it had spiky hair like hers). Tom carried it - wastebasket and all - up the street to the church where he let it loose - hopefully far enough away it would not make its way back to our house.
When the kids ask what's for dinner, or what some unfamilar food is on the table, Tom often answers "possum fritters." We had our chance, but no possum fritters tonight.
It seemed most likely that it was behind the sofa (this would be the sofa that I bought when I was an intern that has been subsequently been destroyed by the cumulative effect of multiple moving companies, three children, and especially the aforementioned Labrador retriever), so Tom looked behind it and didn't see it at first. I went to return Bullwinkle's second blanket (since he was wet) to his crate, but once I opened the door he was out, and the hall door wasn't closed, so Bullwinkle was back in the living room. In the meantime, Tom had spotted it but with the dog back in the room no telling where it had gone.
We turned the sofa over (no animal) but ultimately got it under a blanket and then into a wire wastebasket. It was a young possum, doing its best to look fierce, with its mouth open and hair on end (I told Sarah it had spiky hair like hers). Tom carried it - wastebasket and all - up the street to the church where he let it loose - hopefully far enough away it would not make its way back to our house.
When the kids ask what's for dinner, or what some unfamilar food is on the table, Tom often answers "possum fritters." We had our chance, but no possum fritters tonight.
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