Monthly Archives: March 2005

I am sliding back into that whole purchasing things blindly and quickly off of the internets attitude, I can tell. When I first started working here I was quick to buy an urban garden date book from blissen (and I see that I got in right before it was too late! they’re just about sold out!). I bought new shoes, a pair of danskos that I love love love and had been dreaming of buying for a year. And on top of that, my new bag and wallet arrived in albany this week!

I really don’t want to get back into blind purchasing to fill a void in my life. I don’t want to be in the habit of thinking “I want! I order!” like a study in impulse-control. Really.

But that said, I REALLY LOVE my new calender. I have spent too long today filling in days and appointments and I love seeing all the stuff I’m doing this week/last week all lined up neatly. I’m faced with the big question: special pen, pencil, or whatever is at hand? and how will I write in birthdays? it’s so exciting to have a brand new spotless calender, and to have the opportunity to start to fill it up. Of course, it’s a love hate relationship, because the more full the calender, the more stressed and more frustrated one can be. Or if you never have a reason to use the calender it will languish in your bag for ages, lonesome, untouched, wasted. Hopefully the honeymoon with my new date book doesn’t end. It’s been a really fun few hours…

ok, so I’m really only living with 5 boys total.

this morning one of them popped into the bathroom with me when I was showering.
And it wasn’t the one I know best!

Greg warned me to lock the door because Shankar sometimes just walks into the bathroom but I didn’t, I had forgotten, plus it was so late I guess I figured they were all done and gone. And then Shankar walked in. It was pretty hilarous, to tell the truth. I didn’t scream or anything, I wasn’t sure WHAT to do when he opened the bathroom door and I realized he was in there with me. and when he coughed I started to laugh and said hi. Matt said that Greg told me so, and I got what I deserved. In not so many words…

I SO BADLY need my own apartment.

mom and I had ice cream cones today to celebrate easter and we were both disturbed by the american flag cone wrappers that we had to tear off and throw away. Now, I’m a pretty liberal girl (and do not mind the burning of flags, either), but I do think that respect for the flag is not only appropriate but also tasteful — partly because I think people need to realize that patriotism is HARD WORK, and not something you can just literally wear on your sleeve casually.

I made a quick list of flag uses that bug the heck out of me:

* american flag bathing suits
* american flag logos on old navy apparel
* american flag underpants
* american flag tshirts, esp. if they incorporate a crying eagle, or an eagle with big talons
* american flag car accessories, including:
* tattered flags streaming from car antennas
* american flag beach towels (you stick the flag in your groin! disrespectful! and you put it on the ground! terrible!)
* people hanging out flags and leaving them up unilluminated overnight, or worse
* people not bringing in their flags in the rain
* american flag napkins, paper towels, or worse, sugar cone paper wrappers that you have to rip to remove.

and apparently, these are all if not exactly illegal, at least procribed against by custom. If only these were enforcable:

Title 4, United States Code, Chapter 1 states:

Section 6 (time and occasions for display):

(a) It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed 24 hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness.

(c) The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed.

Section 7 (Position and manner of display):

(b) The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender.

Section 8 (Respect for the Flag):

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.

(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.
…
(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.

(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.

(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.

(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart

I added a love song about pgh, of a sort. it’s circa 5/19.

man, today I am pooped. the tolls of the eventful week and of sleeping poorly and waking early and going to bed late are really affecting me today!

tonight I’m driving up to the Capital District to see the fam. I am still in the PGH mindset of having to drive for 8 hours (a solid 8 hours, it’s never less, and sometimes more) to get to upstate new york. I keep having to mentally shake myself to remind me that from the office, it’s probably just about 2 hours to get up there. Amazing! That’s only 25% of my accustomed trip! So even though I’m awfully tired, the 2 hour drive won’t be horrible and therefore I’m not as scared of dozing off and waking up immediately before I strike the rear wheel of a big heavy full dump truck with my passenger-side front wheel and fender (again) as I might be. Ahem. Long story.

Anyway, I did mention the free coffee and tea and hot chocolate… that goes a long way towards pepping me up. And also, today I found out that fridays there are free bagels! Rock’n’Roll!

News on the housing front: last night after a really wonderful dinner with friends from college I rudely but charmingly asked one of them if I could move into his house with him. He sweetly and charmingly said of course, he would have invited me hizzelf but wasn’t sure how it would be taken by the mister. He also said things like “I’m never home,” “I work a lot,” and “my television set is so big that if you put a movie on of you and stood next to it it would be life size.” Hee!

Next week I’m going to revisit my original plan for living on the train line about 1/2 between the offices (existing and potential), and if that doesn’t pan out quickly I’ll crash with mike while I look. I figure that sure, it’s a terrible, unpedestrian friendly, long long walk from the train to the office — but in the summer it would be a really nice bike ride. And in bad weather, heck, maybe it WON’T be horrible to drive. I’m on day 5 of driving 45 minutes to work each way and it really isn’t as awful as I had imagined. Sure, I’d rather not do it for personal reasons, but it’s not a disaster. NPR is my best friend. Flo is running quite sweetly for an aged vehicle. It’s a reverse commute, so it’s not a disaster with the stop and go. It’s all good!

Spring here is so gorgeous. Yesterday I went to drop off my car to have the wheels aligned and a tire replaced and walked to the bus stop to come to school and it was sunny, beautiful, mild, and the crocuses were blooming like gangbusters!

On the way I realized what it is that I love most about pittsburgh:

Pittsburgh made it easy for me to live my life the way I want to live it.

I’m still reading Affluenza slowly, and I am in the last section which talks about CURING affluenza. In the introduction to the Voluntary Simplicity Movement introduction it says

To conquer [affluenza], most of us need to know we’re not all by ourselves in the battle. We need support from others who are fighting the disease as well. Every addiction nowadays seems to have support groups for its victims, and conquering affluenza, the addictive virus, may require them even more, because there isn’t any social pressure out there to stop consuming — just the opposite.

Before I moved to Pittsburgh I was rushing around, working very hard, and usually spending nearly 10 hours a day in the office doing thankless tasks. I DID buy things to make up for that, and to make up for the things I wasn’t able to do. If you look at all of the crafty projects I bought and didn’t get a chance to do, or all the books I bought and didn’t read, you’ll see my trying to purchase my way into the lifestyle I wanted. So when I moved to Pittsburgh I was able to focus on what I wanted to do. I was able to come to terms with how I wanted live more simply, to restrict my spending, to focus on reading but to use the library, to share my meals with people in their homes. I was able to develop that here. And through some fluke of beautiful fate, I met people in Pittsburgh who were doing the same things: people who were becoming more frugal, and who were interested in sharing time with each other instead of with a job. I found out that a lot of my other internet/real life friends were also struggling with the same types of questions and issues. I was lucky to find the type of community that accepted as facts the things I did: that it was worth it to buy organic milk. That CSAs are valuable endeavors,

So really, even though Pittsburgh has a thousand reasons why it’s easy for me to live the way I want to live (the libraries, the public transportation, the scalability of the city, the way I can ride my bike places, the innovative environmental graduate degrees, the many MANY free cultural events) you all were a big part of that too. And through the miracle of the internets, I get to bring you all with me to NJ. This move will be ok. There are a million things I’ll miss about living here but at least I feel confident in my ability to keep on living well in NJ when I get there.

[[added on 5/27 — and Pennsylvania is great too: when you’re using an online form and have to fill in your state, if you hit P pennsylvania is usually the only one. For NJ there’s several keystrokes to get to the state abbreviation!]]

I got my results back from the greenpeace mercury-in-hair testing program and I am OK! I scored 0.31 ug/g, which is below the 1 ug/g “watch out” value, the 11 ug/g “uh-oh” value, and the greater than 11 ug/g “yikes!” value.

If your laboratory results are less than 1 ug/g, your mercury hair level is below the recommended upper limit. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommend that levels of mercury found in hair be kept below 1 ug/g. In order to maintain this low level, we recommend you do not increase consumption of fish that have high levels of mercury.

The flyer I received with my results also states that “Babies born to mothers with elevated levels of mercury may have problems with neurological development. To estimate risk, the EPA has used multiple epidemiological studies indicating that hair levels as low as 4 to 5 ug/g can lead to adverse effects to the newborn baby.”

Of course, I have to confess that since my results came back I’ve been eating fish NON STOP in the form of sardines. It started a few weeks ago when we were at the coop shopping, and I bought a cute perfect tin of fish. I LOVE the concept of tinned fish. Michelle asked if I had ever had sardines before, and I know I have, but not for quite some time. I have been eating them on crackers with olives. they are So Good. Mostly I think I just love things that one eats on crackers. You really can’t go wrong with that. Yesterday at the coop I bought Kippered fish (in a tin!) and think it will go quite nicely with crackers and maybe some steamed asparagus. And also crackers. Maybe with garlicky cheese on them. Mmm. Crackers.

Last night I had Chilean Sea Bass and while it was INCREDIBLE (in a lemon butter sauce with capers) I feel doubly guilty for it today, they’re very overfished and also on the “Avoid” list.

Greenpeace provided a list of fish dos and don’ts:

Fish that are low in mercury and can be eaten in moderation:
Abalone (farmed), Anchovies, Butterfish, Calamari (squid), Catfish, Caviar (farmed), Clams, Crab (king), Crawfish/crayfish, Flounder, Haddock, Hake, Herring, Lobster (spiny/rock), Mackerel (Atlantic), Mussels (farmed), Oysters, Perch (ocean), Pollock, Salmon (wild), Sardines, Scallops, Shad, Shrimp, Sole, Sturgeon (farmed),Tilapia, Trout, Whitefish
Eat sparingly (less than six 6 oz servings a month):
Carp, Cod, Crab (dungeness), Crab (blue), Crab (snow), Mahi Mahi, Monkfish, Perch (freshwater), Skate, Snapper, Tuna (canned, chunk light)
Avoid (less than three 6 oz servings a month):
Bluefish, Croaker, Halibut, Lobster (American/Maine), Rockfish, Sea Bass, Sea Trout (Weakfish), Tuna (canned, white albacore), Tuna (fresh)
Do not eat:
Grouper, Mackerel (king), Marlin, Orange Roughy, Shark, Swordfish, Tilefish

at some point I really ought to make use of this article (written by a friend of mine) and pursue some quality foundation garments. Hee. Foundation Garments.

Here I am in lovely scenic New Jersey. You know, the GARDEN STATE. I drove in on monday night — the better to find an apartment, my dear! — and planned to go to Lyndhurst yesterday, park the car, and walk around with the intentions of really getting to know the area. And then it SNOWED. it went from high 40s to the teens in 10 hours and it snowed and iced and the roads got nasty and tractor trailors jackknifed and my BRAND NEW windshield wipers got all icy and unable to keep my window nice and spotless. It was brutal!

I did see a couple of apartments,
one was too far south, and kind of small,
the other one was on the north side and has incredibly weirdly sized rooms, no counter space, and only a few small cabinets.

I have a couple more apartments to look at today.
I am also kind of unsure about the town I’ve been focusing on:
it is a town with a walkable downtown and a train station and stuff like that, but it doesn’t have any coffee shops. Like, not even a starbucks, which strikes me as very weird.

The next town up, Rutherford, is way more towny, more shops, beautiful. It even has a used book store!
but the train there doesn’t go in the right direction for me in the AM. So my new strategy is to look in S. Rutherford for a place that is close enough to Lyndhurst that I can ride my bike (They’re only about 1 1/2 miles apart) to the train in good weather, and take the bus in bad weather. This might be overly complicated. If that’s true I’ll probably go with the Weirdly Sized Room apartment.

I do think that maybe my feelings about lyndhurst yesterday had more to do with me being incredibly grouchy after driving around NJ for like 5 years in terrible, no good, very bad weather. And I had a long time to think about it while I went back to JC to pick up the mister for dinner, because traffic was DREADFUL and the roads were TERRIBLE and it’s a good time that 1. I’m not afraid of slipping around and 2. that I know how to drive in snow and ice because there was a lot of that. We had a nice dinner w. friends and I am full and feeling a lot happier now that the sun is out. It’s back to lyndhurst for a 2Pm appt., so I’ll see if the mood sticks!

last night I read about a case before the supreme court involving eminent domain.

Normally eminent domain is what gives governments the ability to take private property and use it for the public gooduse, like building a road or a reservoir or even to expand a road a few feet on either side. [CORRECTION — It’s for public USE, as per the constitution. Thanks to SayUncle for pointing that out! When people usually think of eminent domain they expect it to be for something good, or at least, communal. Like a firehouse.] Sometimes the property owner gets paid, I’m not sure if that’s national or a state law.

Lately, however, governments have been trying to take private land and give it to big shady developers in order to achieve higher tax revenues! They arguing it’s for the best public ECONOMIC good.

Now, let’s not think too hard about
1. the fact that this is a neighborhood destroying strategy or
2. that developers are rarely the best thing for a neighborhood or even
3. that developers and big box chains don’t honestly put THAT much money into an area.

No. Because all of these flaws are not as terrible to me as the fact that municipalities are bending over backwards to attract developers and their perceived future tax revenues and this is a very shady and illegal seizure of land that allows them to offer developers the best deal in order to edge neighboring communities out of the competition! it’s shameful and short-sighted, and I’m so worried that the supreme court won’t throw this out.

This is happening all over the country — the case before the Supreme Court is a CT case, but it’s going on in Utah (Walmart), for example. People argue that they have to prevent neighborhoods from becoming blighted, but I do think there are better ways than knocking them down!

there’s a good round-up of other cases and opinions at SayUncle.

and you can keep track of the case here also.