Too busy to blog for the last couple of months - many posts written in my head (usually while walking the dog around the neighborhood, watching houses go up, silt in the rainwater in the gutter, or while getting updates about neighborhood Pest Control Issues) but none made it to keyboard - at least, not until now.
There is a new group that's been formed to support Morningside parks - the Morningside Parks Commission, Inc. There's a website and a Yahoo group, and the first project they have taken on is a toddler play area at Sidney Marcus Park. You may recall that the sandbox was closed last fall, eliminating a potential neighborhood source for toxoplasmosis exposure. The new group, headed by Natasha Moffitt and Scott Lenhart, is fundraising for a new toddler play area. Presumably the new play area will be Improved and Toxoplasmosis-Free. If you have a toddler, or used to have a toddler, or were ever a toddler yourself, please consider contributing; $75 gets you your very own engraved brick. According to the website, contributions are tax deductible.
Another neighborhood issue that needs attention is a familiar one, if you have read this blog before - that would be Rats. The news from the street is that The Rats are Back. Perhaps the recent rains have flooded them out of their winter quarters in someone's basement, or perhaps falling housing prices have made our street More Affordable - I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, they are back.
Angela had one in a cupboard in her house last week; it was captured and released in a Havahart trap. (Only Angela would do that. Most of us do not really have a heart when in comes to rats in our cupboards.) Then yesterday Tom saw it, or one of its friends or relatives, on our front porch in broad daylight. (Perhaps they prefer househunting by day.) So Tom put out the special, highly toxic Rat Treats in the special dispensers from Do It Yourself Pest Control. This worked amazingly well last time, and then the rats were invading our kitchen regularly. Hopefully this will keep them out of the house altogether.
But, like many other things, Rat Control is a Shared Responsibility. We all need to do our part. So our early summer block party is coming up at the end of the month; flyers should be going out soon, if they haven't already. Tom had wanted to have Trees Atlanta there or someone from the Georgia Urban Forestry Council to tell us why we should all plant trees. Trees are all well and good, but if the neighborhood is being overrun by Rats that seems to me to be a little more urgent. So maybe we should ask the guys from Do It Yourself Pest Control to come set up an exhibit.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Then, the Snow
The snow started this morning while we were at church. It was coming down in golfball-sized clumps of wet snowflakes, covering cars and grass, sticking to trees, but mostly melting on the streets. It doesn't snow much in Atlanta, so there were a succession of kids with sleds, makeshift and otherwise, going down the hills in front of Morningside Presbyterian. Iain went sledding first by himself, then played with the boys next door, and then went sledding again before finally coming inside.
I took the dog for a walk around the block while the snow was still falling heavily. Bullwinkle is a black Laborador retriever, with big feet with webbed toes. He didn't mind walking in the slush along the curb, and the large falling snow flakes made him sort of look like the opposite of a Dalmatian. The family at the corner of Cumberland and North Morningside made a great snowman. The mother told me that her children didn't know how to make a snowman, that they were leaving too much of this to her to do. I told her that was because her children lived in Atlanta, and if she wanted them to know how to make snowmen, she needed to move to Michigan. But they made a great snowman, with a scarf and a hat, a carrot nose, and figs for eyes.
It's now late afternoon and the snow is still falling, but it is not as heavy as it was earlier. The sky is gray and the gutters are full of slush and cold water. It it gets cold tonight, the city will be covered in ice tomorrow. A Sunday afternoon with snow means kids and sleds and snowmen; a Monday morning with ice is another mattter entirely. About once an hour this afternoon there has been the sound of thunder. Snow, and thunder. It's unsettling.
Iain is reading his book now, in front of the fire. I guess it is time for me to think about what we have in the house for dinner.
After the Rain
It rained yesterday - the kind of slow, soaking rain that I expect to have in Atlanta during the winter. I drove the girls to Athens yesterday morning and was in rain for entire drive there and back. It stopped around the time I got back, and I asked Iain if he wanted to try out the radar gun. He had wanted to use it Thursday night, but it was Family Science Night at Morningside Elementary, and we didn't have time.
So we got the dog and the radar gun and walked up to East Rock Springs. Iain positioned himself in line with the curbside maple trees along the edge of the Haygood parking lot, across from Sunken Garden Park, next to one of those "Slow Down" signs that PEDS has distributed around the neighborhood. He probably spent half an hour, checking the speed of cars heading towards Morningside Elementary School. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and there were only a few cars going that slowly - Iain said that a few drivers did wave at him, and that they generally speaking were the ones who were close to the speed limit. There were three vehicles that were going 45 or 46 miles per hour, and lots of them in between that and the speed limit.
For a few minutes I sat on the stone wall alongside the sidewalk, watching, but Bullwinkle didn't want to stay in one place, so we walked around the parking lot instead. There were lots of earthworms stretched out on the asphalt - some were dead, but most were simply in the wrong place, having come up from the drenched ground to avoid drowning, and now were stranded on a parking lot where they would be stepped on or worse.
Thursday night at Family Science Night, Iain and I had attended a session on worms, where a guy from the Hike Inn at Amicalola Falls State Park talked about using worms to get rid of vegetable waste and paper. At the Hike Inn, they have massive vats of worms that they feed table scraps, paper, and even cotton fabric to, and the worms turn it into fertilizer. Of course I knew that worms were an important part of the ecosystem, but I had never thought of them being used for commercial-scale composting. The worms in our gardens do the same kind of magic without us even noticing.
So, I picked a couple of them up and moved them to the stretch of ground between the parking lot and the driveway to the Grizzard House - a strip of ground that is thick with fallen leaves and pine straw, where hopefully earthworms would have the sense to stay and not go wandering around the parking lot. Then there were a few more, and a few more, and then I was finding them everywhere I looked - sometimes I have 4 or 5 or 6 at a time, wriggling in the palm of my hand. I must have moved 50 or 60 of them off the asphalt, while Iain was at the curb with the radar detector.
As we were leaving, he told me that I was the kind of person who would rescue earthworms. I suppose one could hear worse from one's child.
So we got the dog and the radar gun and walked up to East Rock Springs. Iain positioned himself in line with the curbside maple trees along the edge of the Haygood parking lot, across from Sunken Garden Park, next to one of those "Slow Down" signs that PEDS has distributed around the neighborhood. He probably spent half an hour, checking the speed of cars heading towards Morningside Elementary School. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and there were only a few cars going that slowly - Iain said that a few drivers did wave at him, and that they generally speaking were the ones who were close to the speed limit. There were three vehicles that were going 45 or 46 miles per hour, and lots of them in between that and the speed limit.
For a few minutes I sat on the stone wall alongside the sidewalk, watching, but Bullwinkle didn't want to stay in one place, so we walked around the parking lot instead. There were lots of earthworms stretched out on the asphalt - some were dead, but most were simply in the wrong place, having come up from the drenched ground to avoid drowning, and now were stranded on a parking lot where they would be stepped on or worse.
Thursday night at Family Science Night, Iain and I had attended a session on worms, where a guy from the Hike Inn at Amicalola Falls State Park talked about using worms to get rid of vegetable waste and paper. At the Hike Inn, they have massive vats of worms that they feed table scraps, paper, and even cotton fabric to, and the worms turn it into fertilizer. Of course I knew that worms were an important part of the ecosystem, but I had never thought of them being used for commercial-scale composting. The worms in our gardens do the same kind of magic without us even noticing.
So, I picked a couple of them up and moved them to the stretch of ground between the parking lot and the driveway to the Grizzard House - a strip of ground that is thick with fallen leaves and pine straw, where hopefully earthworms would have the sense to stay and not go wandering around the parking lot. Then there were a few more, and a few more, and then I was finding them everywhere I looked - sometimes I have 4 or 5 or 6 at a time, wriggling in the palm of my hand. I must have moved 50 or 60 of them off the asphalt, while Iain was at the curb with the radar detector.
As we were leaving, he told me that I was the kind of person who would rescue earthworms. I suppose one could hear worse from one's child.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Adventures in Recycling
Too much work, too much travel, too much to do when I am home - so I haven't written much. Our new president has not been able to immediately solve our nation's problems and the economy is still in the toilet. But the concert on the Mall just before the inauguration was pretty cool. I kept wondering how, with the big crowd, no one fell into the reflecting pool. Maybe someone did and they just didn't show it on HBO.
I've talked to a couple of friends who were at the inauguration, in the big big crowd on the Mall. One, who spent 12 hours in the cold, said she wouldn't have missed it and she would never do it again. No arrests, but lots of hypothermia, I understand. Now the AP wants a cut of the iconic "Hope" poster by Shepard Fairey, saying it was based on their photo. Fairey has a solo exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and got arrested Friday night on the way to his opening party; two arrest warrants had been issued in January for creating art without a license, or at least without permission.
But back to Atlanta. With the recent budget problems, the city has cut curbside recycling to every other week. The first two weeks after this change, they didn't pick up our recycling at all. Tom called Anne Fauver's office to find out what was going on. He was told that the schedule had been changed and we now had every-other-week pick up. He said he knew that, but with every-other-week pick up, they should still have picked it up on one of the two weeks. The person he was talking to paused and said that was right. It did get picked up the next day.
Since then, it seems to have gotten sorted out, but every-other-week pick up is not frequent enough if you are really trying to recycle. I guess we got serious about this in the spring and summer, and now even in a week have way more recyclable stuff than fits into our city-issued black recycling bin. We have used plastic crates, but they usually end up disappearing, so more recently have just been putting bottles, cans, and other containers into plastic trash bags.
So I just was checking the city's recycling information on line and see that containers for recycling have to be labelled as such and that on request the city provides stickers for this purpose. They also have a 95 gallon rolling recycling cart that can be purchased for $70. The cart looks just like the Herbie Curbies that we all have (although ours is pretty decrepit, having come with the house when I bought it in 1989, and having lost its lid in recent years, to the delight of neighborhood raccoons - but I digress) but is blue. So we will probably get one. I wonder if it is made of recycled plastic? Here's the ordering instructions, for both that and the stickers.
Of course with the economy in the toilet, demand for recyclables is way down. The Times had a story on this in December, and more recently it has been in the AJC. It would be better of course if we just produced less trash. I do use those cloth bags in the trunk of my car pretty consistently at the grocery store, and sometimes remember to take them to other stores. I remember when I was in Munich last year, being impressed at how much less packaging there was for some of the items in the stores. Walking around one evening, I saw someone emerge from a store with the trash can at the end of the day - it was about the size of the trash can we have in our downstairs bathroom.
If we really want recycling, maybe the city should give us the big container for recycling and the small container for our trash. But in the long run, wouldn't it be best if they could both be small?
I've talked to a couple of friends who were at the inauguration, in the big big crowd on the Mall. One, who spent 12 hours in the cold, said she wouldn't have missed it and she would never do it again. No arrests, but lots of hypothermia, I understand. Now the AP wants a cut of the iconic "Hope" poster by Shepard Fairey, saying it was based on their photo. Fairey has a solo exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and got arrested Friday night on the way to his opening party; two arrest warrants had been issued in January for creating art without a license, or at least without permission.
But back to Atlanta. With the recent budget problems, the city has cut curbside recycling to every other week. The first two weeks after this change, they didn't pick up our recycling at all. Tom called Anne Fauver's office to find out what was going on. He was told that the schedule had been changed and we now had every-other-week pick up. He said he knew that, but with every-other-week pick up, they should still have picked it up on one of the two weeks. The person he was talking to paused and said that was right. It did get picked up the next day.
Since then, it seems to have gotten sorted out, but every-other-week pick up is not frequent enough if you are really trying to recycle. I guess we got serious about this in the spring and summer, and now even in a week have way more recyclable stuff than fits into our city-issued black recycling bin. We have used plastic crates, but they usually end up disappearing, so more recently have just been putting bottles, cans, and other containers into plastic trash bags.
So I just was checking the city's recycling information on line and see that containers for recycling have to be labelled as such and that on request the city provides stickers for this purpose. They also have a 95 gallon rolling recycling cart that can be purchased for $70. The cart looks just like the Herbie Curbies that we all have (although ours is pretty decrepit, having come with the house when I bought it in 1989, and having lost its lid in recent years, to the delight of neighborhood raccoons - but I digress) but is blue. So we will probably get one. I wonder if it is made of recycled plastic? Here's the ordering instructions, for both that and the stickers.
Of course with the economy in the toilet, demand for recyclables is way down. The Times had a story on this in December, and more recently it has been in the AJC. It would be better of course if we just produced less trash. I do use those cloth bags in the trunk of my car pretty consistently at the grocery store, and sometimes remember to take them to other stores. I remember when I was in Munich last year, being impressed at how much less packaging there was for some of the items in the stores. Walking around one evening, I saw someone emerge from a store with the trash can at the end of the day - it was about the size of the trash can we have in our downstairs bathroom.
If we really want recycling, maybe the city should give us the big container for recycling and the small container for our trash. But in the long run, wouldn't it be best if they could both be small?
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The Holiday Report
With work and the holidays, I have not had any time for the last month or so – so no updates. Not that we aren’t here, and not that things haven’t been happening. So here is a partial summary of what’s been going on for the last month or so.
The Women of Wessyngton Road met at Lynsley’s and then walked up to Caramba Café for the traditional celebration of the Winter Solstice (that would be drinking Margaritas).
Another house on Wessyngton Road has been leveled, next to the Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH) that has been completed and on the market for the last several months. They had had a notice up that one or more trees were going to be removed, and sometime before Christmas a huge bile of magnolia branches appeared at the curb. Some were salvaged by neighbors, no doubt for holiday decorations - I would have done so myself if I were organized enough. Now, if another LHADAH is built on this lot, then there will be three of them in a row - this one, the one that is already finished, and the one that is still under construction. Does that mean that technically the one in the middle will no longer be an LHADAH?
Christmas morning started with cooking, then present-opening at Kathy and Steve's with Angela, and then later in the morning at our house. Tom got me a radar gun, which is a totally fabulous Christmas present. We went out later in the day looking for moving cars to point it out but it being Christmas Day, there weren't many of them. So we went to Haygood with a load of corrogated cardboard for recycling and took the gun with us. A little kid with a new bike was already in the parking lot there. I did get to clock a couple of cars on East Rock Springs, no doubt to the puzzlement of a couple of drivers who wondered about the crazy woman standing on the curb with the hairdryer. But they did slow down.
We ended up with more people for Christmas dinner than for Thanksgiving. Fred made it for Christmas dinner, as did Angela's former mother-in-law and a friend of Angela's, as well as Angela herself. Fewer leftovers than at Thanksgiving, as I had a better idea of how much 8 or 9 or 10 people would actually eat. We did have gingerbread people, who had what Caroline described as "scary" chocolate-chip eyes.
We went the Washington, D.C., the week after Christmas, and while we were gone one of the rats made a break for it. This would be one of Sarah's pet rats that lives in the cage in an upstairs bathroom, not an unwelcome visiting-from-outdoors kind of rat. This particular rat had escaped once before and had several exciting days living behind the washing machine before being recaptured and returned to the cage. There were many sightings over the several days following our return home - it would emerge from the space between the washing machine and the dryer, only to retreat if we made a move for it - but eventually we were able to recapture it when we found it on top of the cage, presumably updating its former cage mates about life on the run. (That's often how fugitives are caught - they just can't stay away from family and friends.)
During the month of December, a fair amount of effort was expended to make Christmas cards. Several years ago I got a silkscreen kit for Christmas that has since been used to make several different kinds of T-shirts but we never had tried the photoemulsion technique. So Tom worked on that - we did manage to get a usable screen for the drawing for the front (two different designs, one from each daughter) but the screen for the printing inside didn't come out as well, despite a couple of efforts. So we have blank cards. I did print them, but they are still sitting in a pile on the dining room table (which, by the way, still has the extra leaves we put in it for Christmas dinner). My rule is if you get the cards out by Martin Luther King's birthday, they aren't really late. But that would be this weekend, so I guess I need to get started.
The Women of Wessyngton Road met at Lynsley’s and then walked up to Caramba Café for the traditional celebration of the Winter Solstice (that would be drinking Margaritas).
Another house on Wessyngton Road has been leveled, next to the Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH) that has been completed and on the market for the last several months. They had had a notice up that one or more trees were going to be removed, and sometime before Christmas a huge bile of magnolia branches appeared at the curb. Some were salvaged by neighbors, no doubt for holiday decorations - I would have done so myself if I were organized enough. Now, if another LHADAH is built on this lot, then there will be three of them in a row - this one, the one that is already finished, and the one that is still under construction. Does that mean that technically the one in the middle will no longer be an LHADAH?
Christmas morning started with cooking, then present-opening at Kathy and Steve's with Angela, and then later in the morning at our house. Tom got me a radar gun, which is a totally fabulous Christmas present. We went out later in the day looking for moving cars to point it out but it being Christmas Day, there weren't many of them. So we went to Haygood with a load of corrogated cardboard for recycling and took the gun with us. A little kid with a new bike was already in the parking lot there. I did get to clock a couple of cars on East Rock Springs, no doubt to the puzzlement of a couple of drivers who wondered about the crazy woman standing on the curb with the hairdryer. But they did slow down.
We ended up with more people for Christmas dinner than for Thanksgiving. Fred made it for Christmas dinner, as did Angela's former mother-in-law and a friend of Angela's, as well as Angela herself. Fewer leftovers than at Thanksgiving, as I had a better idea of how much 8 or 9 or 10 people would actually eat. We did have gingerbread people, who had what Caroline described as "scary" chocolate-chip eyes.
We went the Washington, D.C., the week after Christmas, and while we were gone one of the rats made a break for it. This would be one of Sarah's pet rats that lives in the cage in an upstairs bathroom, not an unwelcome visiting-from-outdoors kind of rat. This particular rat had escaped once before and had several exciting days living behind the washing machine before being recaptured and returned to the cage. There were many sightings over the several days following our return home - it would emerge from the space between the washing machine and the dryer, only to retreat if we made a move for it - but eventually we were able to recapture it when we found it on top of the cage, presumably updating its former cage mates about life on the run. (That's often how fugitives are caught - they just can't stay away from family and friends.)
During the month of December, a fair amount of effort was expended to make Christmas cards. Several years ago I got a silkscreen kit for Christmas that has since been used to make several different kinds of T-shirts but we never had tried the photoemulsion technique. So Tom worked on that - we did manage to get a usable screen for the drawing for the front (two different designs, one from each daughter) but the screen for the printing inside didn't come out as well, despite a couple of efforts. So we have blank cards. I did print them, but they are still sitting in a pile on the dining room table (which, by the way, still has the extra leaves we put in it for Christmas dinner). My rule is if you get the cards out by Martin Luther King's birthday, they aren't really late. But that would be this weekend, so I guess I need to get started.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
At Home (Wessyngton & North Highland)
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?
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?
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.
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