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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.