The Lot

A few weeks ago I joined up with a few friends to create a little experiment in urban farming. We threw some money into a hat (ok, really it was a paypal account) and bid on an empty lot in a tax foreclosure auction. Today we headed out to break ground and start planning. Most of us, like myself, won't be doing the farming ourselves, but a bit of digging and layering of ingredients for the first bed was certainly in order. So, here we are, checking things out on a gorgeous fall morning.

Digital Me

Logging on to the social networks has been rather strange of late. For the last two weeks, I've been following the news of national and state politics through FB links provided by friends. I appreciate seeing the depressing reports of attacks on women and unions framed by the wise words of my lefty friends. It has made it a bit easier to take by reminding me that while the world "out there" is scary, I am not alone in my disgust and outrage. The odd bit about having spent so much time on FB recently is that interspersed with posts on the violence in Libya, attempts to slash funding for Planned Parenthood, and drastic cuts to the state's already pitiful education budget are updates on the inane bits my and my friends' lives. The absurdity of this has actually been comforting and I've appreciated FB more in these weeks than perhaps ever before.

The 'magic moment' is probably coming to an end, however. I've had a good run with FB, but now more and more of my extended family are finding me there. I've also had close encounters will students who know people I know. I'd prefer to keep FB confined to people with whom I have to censor little in my life, but unless I go more deeply underground (a la Dickish McBastard), this can't last and the idea of managing everyone with lists and settings that seem to get changed periodically by the powers that be at FB holds no interest for me. Ah well, for now cousins will just have to languish unacknowledged in my "friend request" folder while I milk this for a bit longer. I'm just not ready to give it up.

Bike with Bike Ypsi Once Again

Spring is springing and it is time to ride, people! Come out for the Bike Ypsi Spring Ride and Festival 2009 on May 3. Medium and long rides start at 10:00am, a neighborhood ramble (self-guided) goes from 10:30 until 1:00pm, and then its hot- and not-dogs, booths, bike polo, and there is some talk of games. Cool people go to the Corner after for a beer. It was amazing last year (see those happy faces????) with 120+ people. And there is a new run of BY t-shirts!



Also, as we did last year, Bike Ypsi is organizing Bike to Work Fridays for the month of May. Here is the deal...

May is bike to work month. Meet up with local Ypsi-to-Ann Arbor commuters every Friday in May for a leisurely ride to work. We ride rain or shine.

On May 1, 8, 22, and 29, we will meet at 8:00am at Bombadill's coffee shop (217 W Michigan Ave) for the ride in to AA (leaving by 8:15am).

On May 15, there is a special Bike to Work rally in at the AA Farmers' Market and we will meet at Bombadill's at 7:15 and leave by 7:30am in order to attend. All riders are encouraged to wear their Bike Ypsi t-shirts on this day (these would be the t-shirts you can buy at the spring ride on May 3)! There will be food and give-aways at the rally.

Return rides will meet every Friday at 5:15pm at AA Farmers' Market in Kerry Town to ride back to Ypsi.

Bombadill's offers free coffee to all helmet-bearing cyclists before our Friday rides! Help yourself from the pot at the front of the store.

Routes are chosen based on where people need to go, but we generally have a group that rides out Packard and one that rides out through Gallup Park.

We will end our rides at the Tap Rom Annex (W. Michigan Ave) for happy hour specials. They haven't told us what the deal will be yet, but they were delighted to be asked and mentioned cooking up some "freebies" for us, so I'm excited!

All riders are encouraged to wear helmets for these rides!


See the happy riders in these pics from last year's Bike to Work rides? Yes, we even rode home in the rain one evening... but it was a warm rain and there was beer at the end and we had much fun being silly and wet. Give it a whirl if you are heading to AA some Friday.

"A Day On" or "Girl with Sledgehammer"

As has become our tradition, E and I spent much of this Marin Luther King, Jr. Day volunteering. She has always had a special affinity for this holiday since she was born on MLK day in 1999, but more than that, she has embraced both the history and the message of day.




After many years of her asking, I finally signed us up to work with Motor City Blight Busters this year. I was reluctant to take a kid to tear down crack houses, but now that she is the ripe old age of 10 (read: I was late in signing us up and this was all that was left!), I thought we would give it a try. MCBB is located in Old Redford, where every 6th or so house seems to be abandoned -- there is plenty of work to do. Our job today (probably to E's great disappointment) was to not tear down a house, but rather to clear out a small warehouse a block off Grand River so that it could be renovated and used as a childcare center.



We started out inside, shoveling up the debris left behind when the last folks -- people who the neighbors said only came and went in the middle of the night -- decamped. We found lots of evidence of a business (invoices and such) but also plenty of evidence that folks had been living in the basement (shoes, exercise videos, school books, underwear, etc). Lots of volunteers with axes and shovels made for too much dust and too many heavy tools being flung about, so E and I shifted to outside work... hauling out load after load of debris, clearing the junk after others smashed up old furniture/building materials. E eyed the sledgehammer but didn't ask. When the other smashers had wandered off and the flow of debris cans had slowed, I encouraged her to do her best at destroying an old rocking chair. She loved it. Later she had me carry a sledgehammer over to an old shed so she could do some work on that.

Neighbors

So.... some new folks moved in across the street. On the plus side, one of them is an 8-year old boy and my kids are delighted to have a new playmate. But the interactions I've had with mom have been nothing but strange and awkward.

The first time she tried to introduce herself was when I was sitting on the front porch, talking with a friend from Georgia who has gone through large life changes of late. I did need to finish up with this call, but there a lot of ground to cover. I tried to motion to the new neighbor that I was on the phone (I assumed it must not have been obvious or she wouldn't have approached me then) and would catch up with her when I was done. I'm not sure I was successful. By the time I got off the phone, she had wandered down the street out of sight.

Then last night, she came by while I had another friend over. I wouldn't have answered the door, except that I guessed that it was her kid who had buddied up to mine and was playing in the backyard. I thought she wanted him back and wanted to check in with me before heading back there. Well, no, she wanted to introduce herself. And I guess she wanted to chitchat, but serious awkwardness ensued because she answered all my questions with single words...

"Are you new to the area?"

"Yes."

"Where did you come from?"

"Taylor."

"Oh, that's not too far..."

"No."

"So, is your son going to the local school in the fall?"

"Maybe."

Okay, I give up. After all, I had abandoned my friend in the house... I made my 'gotta go' noises and scooted back in.

Then tonight, the kids are out playing while I am making dinner. I see that the new kid is over but all seem to be getting along well, so I let them be. Then I hear an adult talking... but it doesn't seem to be to the kids so I look around and find the neighbor mom has walked past the kids, up my driveway and is standing in my open garage talking on her cell phone while smoking a cigarette. Then she strolls down the driveway to chat with the kids. I can smell the smoke coming in the kitchen and dining room windows, so I pop outside. She is still on the phone. I say "Hi (note my pleasant greeting). Please don't smoke around my kids or my house."

She apologizes and scurries away so quickly that I don't think she heard me about not smoking around the house. Strange.

Then, later, while we are eating dinner and then every ten minutes afterward, the boy knocks loud and long on the door asking if O can come back out and play yet.

Oh my. New neighbors.

Well done, Bike Ypsi... but now what?

Run down of the bike festival:

1. Gorgeous day. Bright and chilly in the morning, but stayed bright and got warm quickly.

2. Lots of folks. Maybe 20 on the long rides and 60 on the not-so-long rides. Over 100 rode the community ride.

3. Good booths. Washtenaw Biking and Walking Coalition, St. Joe's, Project Grow, PEAC, Rails to Trails, and the Ypsi Food Coop all had tables. Wheels in Motion and Tree Fort really turned out. The former tweaked mechanicals on lots of bikes, including a bit o' work on my back wheel and squishy brake. My next biking business will go to them.

4. Minimal no-shows. AATA was supposed to send a bus so we could let people practice putting their bikes on the racks but some sort of crisis downtown distracted them and the bus never came. I did get a call from them this morning apologizing (good) and they are eager to come out to our next happening. Two Wheel Tango notified us a few days before the event that they were not going to come -- disappointing, but at least they let us know. Ypsi Cycle just plain did not show. I do not understand that one.

5. Surprise hit. Bike polo and kids apparently go together quite nicely. I was really happy to see that the usual crowd of polo playing adults mostly wore helmets and then happily worked with the kids who got curious to teach them the game and let them play.

6. Nice rides. It looked for a while there like I was again going to have to shorten my ride, but the folks who were not up to the 19-20mph pace of the fast group proved happy to do the whole 30 miles at 16mph. I don't mind riding slow... as long as I get to ride long. I did have to do a few wicked sprints to move between the front and back of a way stretched out group (which we eventually broke into two) and a mechanical breakdown and the main group. Pretty fun to see that I could get 23.5mph -- and not just on a downhill. The community ride (pictured above) was a bit intimidating to launch but rolled nicely once we got going. Letting the group break into groups during the ride actually seemed to work, but that was mostly due to having sooooo many Bike Ypsi people there to make sure somebody who knew the way and would look out for the group was at the head of every clump of riders.

7. No major disasters. One kid fell (he was fine), we ran out of hot dogs (Andy got more), we forgot to mention that we were selling t-shirts (let me know if you want one!)... but really? Nothing big. No fires to put out. Nice.

So now what? I've been a part of planning the Bike Ypsi Spring Ride and Festival for months. K tells us it has been [deep breath] 5 months in the works. Wow. I didn't really notice that because there were a few other issues along the way (like weekly rides, Bike to Work, and preserving the Ford Blvd road diet/bike lanes) and because I really enjoy the people in Bike Ypsi. The meetings were fun, the post-meetings involved happy hour at the Corner, and the between-meetings meet-ups usually had us on bikes pedaling out and about in the world.

I suspect that with this second big and successful event (you might recall that we had a fabulous fall ride in Oct 2007), there will be some fresh blood looking to get in on the Bike Ypsi love and the group will change because of that. There will be new agendas. Organizational issues will have to be dealt with. People will take us back over ground we have already covered. Personalities may clash. I'm happy to have new recruits (we don't want to burn out!), but I just gotta say, this first year has just been a blast.

Bike Love.

Many of my bike freak pals and I have been riding enthusiastically since March, but May is going to be it... the month of the bike. I hope you'll come out and find your own bike love.

Bike Ypsi's Spring Ride and Festival is Sunday (May 4) in Rec Park. There are long, medium, and short rides in the morning and then food, bike related booths, bike polo, and a kid bike rodeo until 2:30pm (we'll be in the Senior Center if the weather is really bad). Cool stuff will be happening: mechanics to show you how to do basic things for your bike, an AATA bus so you can practice putting your bike on the rack without the threat of holding up a busload of impatient passengers, info on gear and nutrition, a helmet give-away, WCC fitness center passes, etc.

Every Friday in May I'll be biking to AA with anyone who wants to ride. There's been a "bike to work" initiative nationwide for years and my encounter with one of these rides in 1993, a week or two after I moved to Atlanta, helped launch me into being an urban bike commuter for the rest of the years I lived in Georgia. It is probably too much to hope that these Yspi-AA rides will have quite the same impact on any of the participants, but you never know... So, if you've thought about but hesitated to ride to AA, please come with me. We're leaving from Bombadill's: 8:00am on May 2, 9, 23, and 30; 7:15am on May 16 (since there is a big rally in downtown AA that day). Return ride is from AA City Hall, leaving at 5:15pm and ending at Haab's for free happy hour appetizers.

BTW, the image on this post is from a "Good Roads Rally" in SF in 1896: 5,000 riders showed up demanding, yep, better roads.

summer camp

In looking around for summer camps for kids, a friend directed me to Anti-Oppression Camp. Oh yay! I want to go to social justice camp. Pretty please? I'll need it for creating the compound. Right?

"And Some Kind of Help..."

“And Some Kind of Help, Is the Kind of Help, that Helping’s All About”

I loved, loved, loved Free to Be You and Me as a kid (yes, doesn’t that just explain so much?). One of the more prominent themes in it is that we should get past our stereotypes and rampant individualism enough to help each other out. But do we?

Over the last few months, many of the people in my immediate circles (myself included) have needed help – help with jobs, help with houses, help with mental health, help with transportation, etc. Watching this, I’ve been struck by how hard it has been for folks (again, myself included) to actually ask for help. We seem to assume that we shouldn’t ask, that we should do for ourselves, and, maybe, that our friends won’t want to pitch in.

But what I have witnessed is that people will do for each other. What keeps us from asking is our own fear that we are “imposing” or asking “too much.” It isn’t that big a deal for me to watch other people’s kids, yet I seem to think it is a huge deal for them to watch mine. I’ll toddle over to help a friend move some furniture, but I won’t call for help when I need some moral support after my garbage disposal has exploded.

With my most recent household project, however, I did put out a minor call for help and I got plenty. The job of stripping wallpaper seemed overwhelming to me – I was responsible for how long the kitchen was off-line, I had to choose the paint color, etc. – but, really, it was not that big a deal for those who helped – a few hours of their time but hours that included socializing, food, and beer.

All of this only reinforces my desire for a “compound” – a group of folks all living in close proximity who function more like family (in other words, people to whom you feel mutual responsibility) than merely “friends” or “neighbors” who are either physically not around when you need them or are around but only by accident rather than by design. I want people to whom I can go for help without a second thought. I do want my own space, mind you, but I would also be delighted to come home and find S or S or A or A or several other people drinking coffee in my (our?) kitchen. I would love for my kids to have 4 or 5 houses whose back doors were always open to them. I would love to go to the store for milk and buy for 15 people instead of 4. I would love to know that as I’m wrangling with all the sucky decisions that come with being a grown-up there is not just one person invested in my thought processes, but many. We seem to too often make things more complicated than they need to be. Why does every house on my block have a lawn mower? Why can’t I go out while my children are sleeping even though there are adults at home 10’ away from their bedroom window (but in a different house)? Why do I have to figure things out all on my own?

Admittedly, I’m a bit stuck on how to move out of my nuclear family, 1950s brick ranch house existence to this other model, but my want is real, it is on-going, it is large…