The Field

What to do during Earth Hour

This post comes early or late, depending on your geographic position, but we've still got a few minutes yet till 8:30 local time, so it's not technically late from my point of view.  I was thinking of things to do during Earth Hour:

*Trivial Pursuit, anyone?  Play board games. 

*A stroll through the neighborhood at night can be fun.

*Munch on food prepared without electricity. 

*Try to read by candlelight and be thankful for electricity.

*Your electronic toys are all effectively broken for an hour and reading isn't much of an option.  After you've played a game or two, what could you and your significant other possibly do to pass the time in your dark, romantically candlelit dwelling?  Hmm...

Comparing the Walkability of two suburban neighborhoods

So we had a good walk the other day, setting out from our apartment through the neighborhood and the big nearby open space via trails and sidewalks to explore a different open space we’d never been to before.  On the way back, we stopped at the clubhouse for some free tea and coffee, and then walked to the grocery store to pick up a few things before having dinner at a local pizza place and finally returning home.  This combination of walking for both recreation and utility in the same trip would have been very unlikely only four and a half miles away in the neighborhood where I grew up, but it is quite easy here. 

 

This neighborhood, at least our section of it, was built around 2003 and seems to have had at least a modicum of thought put into it.  It consists of high quality apartments and townhomes, with restaurants and businesses built into the neighborhood along a main street, and single-family detached houses, which, although much, much too large in my opinion, are nonetheless quite attractive with varied designs, hidden rear garages and lots of neat little parks interspersed to make up for the fact that the houses occupy almost their entire lot and are very close together.  Solar pv’s on the roofs are quite common.  And, even unfinished though it is with the aforementioned empty lots, there’s a lot of necessities and community assets within a short walk for everyone in the neighborhood. 

 

Oddly, as if to emphasize how nice it is, there’s an adjacent block of houses west of us that, despite being built only a year earlier, are depressingly 20th century.  They’re big and blocky, ugly and monotonous, with comparatively few parks, no mix of housing types, and no businesses.  You’d think nothing had been learned since the days when my parent’s house was built.

 

My parent's house and the neighborhood where I grew up are old fashioned in all the wrong ways.  The neighborhood is a typical late 20th century American suburban neighborhood, dating to about 1980.  It's a big rectangle of single family detached houses dropped on the landscape like a bomb just beyond the preexisting edge of the city.  The houses are a study in how not to design a house.  They’re drafty, dark, inefficient, and generally look like a large car garage with a sad living quarters attached to it.  They care nothing for the landscape or their orientation relative to the sun, and the limited number of designs repeat, creating a confusing labyrinth along the unnecessarily wide streets. 

For comparison, I used Google Earth to find useful things within a 1 mile radius of our apartment and within a 1 mile radius of my parent’s house. 

 

Here's a list:

 

Parent’s house (built about 1979):

* Recreation: good access to parks, open spaces, trails, and rec centers.

*Schools: a public elementary, middle and high school.

*Restaurants: 3 (1 local coffee place at 0.93 miles,

1 local burrito place about same distance and a Starbucks at 1 mile.)

*Gas stations: 1 at 0.95 miles.

*A small amount of other business and retail.

[To be fair, a number of things nearly make the cut: a Sonic at 1.01 miles, a Subway at 1.02, a bank 1.05, and a grocery store at 1.06.]

 

Our apartment (2003):

*Recreation: good access to parks, open spaces, trails, and rec centers.

*Schools:  1 pre-school, 1 k-12 private school and a community college.

*Restaurants: ~30 ranging from fast food to coffee places to casual to slightly more fine dining.

*Grocery stores: 2 (3 if you count Walgreens, 4 if you count the new Walmart being built.)

*1 public library.

*Gas stations: 2.

*Churches: 5(!)

*Banks: 3.

*Various other retail and businesses.

 

 

Our new neighborhood has the same strengths as my parent’s neighborhood (good access to recreation and schools) plus a lot more.  It’s the clear winner for providing its residents with lots of the things they need and want within a short, easy walk. However, just because something is within a mile radius doesn't mean it's a mile walk.  Everything is farther away when you account for the often meandering paths one must take to reach one's destination.  This makes it even more important that developments have well designed density with things close at hand.  Again using Google Earth I determined the distance by the shortest walking route to a couple destinations in each neighborhood. 

 

Walking route to the nearest restaurant: 1.2 miles from my parent's house vs. 0.2 miles from our apartment.

 

Walking to the grocery store: 1.33 miles from my parent's house vs. 0.66 miles from our apartment.

 

Of course 1.33 miles is by no means a long walk, but if you don't want fetching a half gallon of milk to take all afternoon and if you have to carry everything you buy home on your back that extra 2/3 of a mile makes a big difference in deciding whether or not you're willing to hoof it.  I'm grateful that we have so much so close, as it allows us to save gas while getting exercise and fresh air. 

 

But it could be even better.  For instance:

*The neighborhood could be more bike friendly – our apartments should rent bike lockers in addition to the car ports and garages.

*All the roof space on top of the apartments is wasted.  It should be used for community gardens, or covered in solar panels, or a mix of the two.

*The houses here are way too big.

*The neighborhood should be even denser with more apartments and townhomes and yet more businesses, all without sacrificing comfort.

*Better access to public transit like buses and rail (which should exist.)

 

Will people get out of their cars if walking is a reasonable alternative?  I do.  Given all the benefits, personal and ecological, of a dense, walkable neighborhood, I can’t understand why anyone would ever be allowed to again build like they did in the bad old days of the late 20^th century.

A short question regarding health care reform and conservative Christians

To all the conservative Christians grousing about the passage of health care reform: do you think Jesus would ever imply that poor people are poor because they're lazy, sick people are sick because they deserve to be, and only those rich enough to afford it should have access to health care? 

Ghost streets of a non-development

Wow, what a wasteland this blog is, huh?  Not updated in three quarters of a year.  Maybe its purpose no longer seemed defined to me, since my fiance and I moved to a new neighborhood and I no longer visit or clean up the field regularly.  Also, laziness. 

Speaking of wastelands, there are two empty lots, one west of the restaurants and another east of the clubhouse, on opposite sides of the pleasant apartment/townhouse neighborhood we live in now.  The west one was graded at the same time as the rest of the neighborhood back in 2002, and since then a bank has been built in one corner and some townhomes in another corner, and a strange road to nowhere paved through the middle of it, but most of it remains ceded to the weeds.  The developers haven't even gotten that far with the other one.  Neatly hidden from view in the neighborhood by a fence, the area was graded in 2006, and the development that was started has yet to be finished.  Concrete gutters define streets never paved and the edges of nonexistent sidewalks.  Water lines were apparently installed, shown by manhole covers, fire hydrants and sewer line caps.  And that's it.  Concrete lines and rusting iron circles that will disappear beneath colonizing plants in a few years time if no one does anything with it.  Prairie dogs will return, and snakes likely already find the heaps of broken concrete piled down the middle of one of the non-streets to be excellent habitat.

I find it interesting to explore, as I would any ruin, although it isn't so much a ruin as a complete failure to build in the first place, which is itself an interesting occurrence.  And if, as I suspect, this and the other lot represent small ruins of the unsustainable, then its return to nature is fine with me.  But if someone built a dense, walkable neighborhood with a few more restaurants or other businesses to add to the local repertoire there, I wouldn't mind. 

"If I had a shotgun..." Snippets from Open Space, week of 6/22

The other day I sat in the boughs of a rather horizontal cottonwood, the only nearby source of shade in the middle of a rolling prairie, crunching a ripe apple. That was a good break. Later I saw a very yellow bumble bee land on a white larkspur, and the contrast between the white flowers and the yellow and black bumble bee was very cool.

The day before I found some fossil clamshells in a shale outcropping. I left them there, of course, but took a picture.

A few days earlier I was inside a bird closure area, near an osprey nest. I asked Christian, a wildlife tech and avid birder, if those people over there were allowed to fly their buzzing model planes so close to the bird closure. His expression soured and his tone betrayed the truth of his desire as he said, "If I had a shotgun, I would shoot that fucking thing down." I guess they are allowed to fly their planes that close to the raptor closure, but the people who favor the birds don't like it, not one bit.

We've been working hard, really hard, to kill all the flowering Mediterranean sage plants before they go to seed, but the wet climate this year has brought up an order of magnitude more plants than there were last year while the economy has seen to it that we have fewer staff members to deal with it. We were supposed to be done by now, but there's still hundreds of plants on our land out there, dropping their flowers and starting to dry out as they go to seed. Hopefully we'll be able to get almost all of them next week.

The most littered thing (February cleanup)

Do you want to know what the single most littered item is?  The beverage container.  Whether plastic or glass bottles, aluminum cans, or paper or styrofoam cups, the disposable beverage container is the item littered more commonly than any other, and the creek has an almost limitless amount of them half submerged in tepid water or caught in the cattails.  Plastic bags might come in second, wrapped intricately as they are around so, so many bushes and tree branches, billowing like flags in the wind.  There are an awful lot of empty cigarette packages out there, too, and single serving food wrappers, paper, newsprint and otherwise, and soggy cardboard boxes.  After that the detritus becomes more random and weird -- milk jugs, roof shingles (well, this has been a windy winter) styrofoam everything, motor oil bottles, broken toys, lost surveyor's equipment. 

It was unseasonably warm and sunny Tuesday, so I decided to finally get around to cleaning up in the field.  I was afraid at first that my effort might be unnecessary, since I had seen a sign for a neighborhood cleanup that happened recently.  But whether they cleaned up the field or not, whether they did a good job or not, it's been windy.  Progress was slow while the trash bags quickly increased in girth and weight.  I filled three bags before the light faded and I resolved to return the next day to finish covering the trails.  It was warm again on Wednesday, and I filled another three bags.  I also found a second small patch of myrtle spurge, this one on the pretty, grassy hill overlooking Mayfair Park, where I also discovered an outcropping of sandstone whose fine, wavelike texture was highlighted by the slanting sun. 

I pulled the weeds and then discovered a large, orange piece of equipment of mysterious origin and function.  It had four legs that folded out (with difficulty, as they were bent and rusted) so that a central stalk could stand alone, displaying a small circle of orange steel about six feet high.  I don't know what it was, but it looked like who ever was using it probably folded it up and laid it down, intending to fetch it later, but then couldn't find it, or only realized the truck was short one big orange thing when he got back to the office.  It's dangerous to set tools down on the prairie, even big, brightly painted ones.  I considered leaving it, but then decided it was my duty to remove it.  Let the city dispose of it, or, if it was supposed to be there, the city could return it and in doing so give some poor open space worker a task with which to consume time and justify his employment.  It was heavy.  I noticed an old snag in the middle of the field that raptors have frequently perched on in the past has fallen over recently, no doubt during one of this winter's wind storms.  I saw a hawk perching instead in one of the trees bordering the field, in someone's backyard.

Oh, as I was cleaning the creek near the road, a policeman happened to be patrolling by.  He said "Good work!" and that made me feel all warm and fuzzy.  Those with the power to intimidate me also have the power to validate me.   

A deep time ago in Colorado

His sail warmed by the sun, the dimetrodon ambles nimbly among the arborescent horsetails on the sandy bank of a clear stream flowing out of the Ancestral Rockies. He pauses to dine on the carcass of a giant millipede, looking up to the canopy of the new forest as he gulps down chunks of flesh. The scaly, hundred-foot-tall poles of the lepidodendron trees are bare but for their leafy, bifurcated heads. A giant dragonfly buzzes loudly overhead, blotting the sun for an instant.

His claws dig words in the bank as he waddles off among the green roots of the scale trees, and his mountains will erode to sand and a sea will cover the place and dry up and more mountains will rise and fall and then rise again before his distant descendents start thinking about geology.
And his words are,

“My bones are your rocks and my forest your fuel,
but my earth you shall never have.”

I asked for a better deal and I got one!

I'd like to tell the world that I did something uncharacteristically bold today, something I've never done before.  I bargained on the price of an item in a store and got a better than advertised deal.  I went to the mall looking for a few presents, among them a multitool for my brother (don't tell him) and on the way to Eddie Bauer I stopped in Restoration Hardware, which has tables of neat looking little gadgets very similar to those at EB.  I continued to EB and found the multitool I was looking for and was about to check out when the salesperson asked if I'd noticed their buy-one-gadget-get-one-gadget-half-off sale. 

I said I'd check it out.  There were a few things I considered maybe getting in addition to the multitool, perhaps as a gift for someone else, among them a little multitool in the shape of a key that can be carried on a key ring, but it was $16.50 at EB.  I decided to check the gadgets at RH again.  There I found the same key-shaped multitool, same brand, marked at $12.00, and RH's gadget sale was 30% off all gadgets, so it was really only $8.00.  That still seemed like a bit much for this simple little tool, and I still wanted the original multitool at EB.  So I returned to EB, explained RH's price on the key tool, and made them the following proposition: If I would buy the multitool there, would they give me RH's price on the key multitool, making it $12.00, and, as the lesser of the two gadgets I was buying, apply their sale to RH's price, allowing me to purchase the key tool for $6.00?  The woman behind the counter handed the problem over to the other salesperson, and I explained the proposition again to him.  He looked at the items for about two seconds and then said, "Sure." 

For the utili-key, marked at $16.50, I paid $6.00, a discount of 64% and for no other reason than that I asked for it. 

I guess it goes to show that it's a buyer's market this year -- everything in the stores is on sale, and they're so desperate to move merchandise that if you ask for a better price you just might get it.  The guy agreed to the discount so quickly that afterward I thought I should have gone lower.  But the real story is that I asked at all.  In between discovering the price and sale difference and actually asking about it I spent a good hour and a half... maybe two... wandering the mall aimlessly, running over the hypothetical scenario in my mind, planning out everything I might say and how they might respond and what I might say in return, and even how I would tell people about it afterward.  But I didn't expect to do it, not really.  At any given point, the most likely outcome was just buying the single multitool and leaving.  After all, I didn't really need the utili-key and wasn't really sure what I'd do with it, and I don't advocate buying for the sake of buying.  If I spent no money I'd be getting a better deal than if I spent six dollars on something I didn't really need.  But it became a personal challenge in my mind, to see if I could do it.  And in spite of my general anxiety about interacting with humans any more than absolutely necessary, I did, and got rewarded for it, and that feels pretty good.  I should definitely be brave enough to ask about things like that in the future.

The increasingly romantic tale of Somali pirates

 Real pirates, of course, weren’t free-spirited, swashbuckling rogues with hearts of gold.  They didn’t swing onto your man-o-war, grin irrepressibly as they humiliated the stuffy Admiral in a sword fight, and sweep his oppressed daughter off her feet all while making off with the gold, gunpowder and spices.  No, they killed you and then took your things.  Oppressed daughter?  Raped, and then probably killed too.  Modern pirates are also like that, except even scarier because now instead of dueling pistols and rapiers they have assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. 

  

 

 It was through that lens that I first heard about the now rampant piracy occurring in the lawless waters of the Gulf of Aden off the coasts of the “country” of Somalia.  Somalia, failed state that it is, provides a safe harbor for criminals, and U.S. and U.N. navies claim they can’t be everywhere at once.  So pirates raid at will, boarding ships, taking hostages and stealing cargo.  They’ve become increasingly bold, even hijacking an oil tanker laden with oil.  It’s terrorism at sea, making the world a slightly darker and scarier place.

 

 

 But what’s this?  It turns out that many of the pirates were only local fishermen or desperate youths a few years ago, driven to piracy by the horrible conditions of their homeland and competition with foreign fishing operations.  Referenced here and here, the environmental degradation caused by the foreigners, who have apparently polluted the waters and killed off the fish, has rendered them unable to survive by fishing.  So now piracy is the best game in town, the only industry that’s hiring and pays well.  And Somalia is such a shambles that the pirates are actually boosting the local economy.  When the pirates come ashore, they spend their ill-gotten money in local villages.  The poor people in those places are taking the pirates’ money and using it to buy the necessities of life, send their kids to school, and generally have a little more hope for the future.  Pirates as folk heroes, anyone? 

  

 

 The latest chapter is news of an Indian navel vessel, the INS Tabar, sinking a pirate mother ship.  The 400 foot warship ordered the pirate ship to stop and be searched.  The pirate ship refused to surrender, even though it must have been obvious that their vessel, (I’d guess a converted fishing boat) and hand held weapons were no match for the armored warship’s missile launchers and six-barreled, 30 mm machine guns.  An unknown number of pirates went down to a watery grave in the fight.  And why?  One of their small raiding boats managed to escape while the mother ship was being cut to pieces.  Was it bravery and self-sacrifice for their mates that drove them to this hopeless fight?  Would their unyielding spirits simply not let them surrender?  At any rate it seems that if confrontations like this continue more pirates will be sporting eye patches and improvised artificial limbs in the future.  

  

It gets better.  The pirates have been treating their hostages well, even hiring caterers to serve Western meals while they wait for the ransom money to come in.  Do they also play chess with them and engage in battles of wit?  It seems you might survive your encounter with Somali pirates after all, escaping the adventure with everything but your stolen heart (unless you’re a man, in which case you’ll be given the option of either becoming a pirate yourself or walking the plank.)

 

 

Seriously, though, PIRATES?  For real?  That’s messed up.

October cleanup: Found notes 1

I cleaned up today for the first time in a while.  It wasn't too bad -- two bags worth, plus some Russian olives.  I know now that it's fairly useless for me to cut Russian olives without putting herbicide on the stumps -- there's regrowth everywhere from stuff I've cut in the past.  But maybe it's better than nothing.  Regrowth is fairly easy to weed, and if I keep them from getting huge then maybe they'll be easier to kill if a city crew with the proper tools ever comes along.  The tamarisk also resprouted over the summer into an impressive little bush, which I also cut down. 

I saw a prairie dog today, confirming that there's still a few stragglers left.  I don't know if the city's done with them yet, though.  There's been some activity in the field lately, planting little cottonwoods near the creek (very nice) and cleaning up some of the chunks of old asphalt and concrete that have been littering the former prairie dog colony for many years (much appreciated).  I just wonder, did they see killing the prairie dogs as part of some sort of beautification project?  I hope they leave the few survivors alone.  It was nice to hear one barking at me after it had seemed so quiet down there.

Also, given its proximity to an elementary school and a high school, it isn't unusual for me to find the occasional note in the field when I'm cleaning up. They get passed in class and then, somehow, they end up scattered along the trail or in the grass. Here's one from today.

Media: half of a blue "post it" note.

First side, in very light pencil, somewhat feminine lettering:
If If Luke asks
you out what
would you say?

Second side, in bold pencil:
He has to ask

I like this. The anonymous responder knows what she's about -- if Luke wants to know what she'd say, well then, he'll just have to grow a pair and ask her himself. You go, anonymous responder girl (or boy, I don't know.)