Early on living in my new urbanist neighborhood, a neighbor and I were discussing the unique connectedness of the community and she pointed out a potential downside. Statistically, eventually, something bad was going to happen to someone in our community and it would be a great blow when it did. I thought this was rather morbid but probably accurate.

Recently a neighbor I was very friendly with and whose family I like very much passed away far too early and far too fast. This neighbor was active and involved in the community and will be dearly missed. And while yes, this has been very, very sad for our community, the benefits of knowing and liking your neighbors far outweigh the potential for emotional distress when bad things do happen in your community. New urbanism is about real, connected life and sadly, bad things such as death are an intrinsic part of that. I know this neighbor really enjoyed living in our community, and their family has recieved tremendous support from it during this trying time. Isn’t that what a real community is actually about? Not how it is during the best times, but during the worst.

Right now the new urbanist Stapleton development in Denver is having a bit of a crisis.  There are more kids in the development than there are seats for in the 2 neighborhood elementary schools.  There is no money to build a new school due to the way Stapleton set-up funding for school construction which is dependent on taxes raised by development within Stapleton.  You can see the flaw in this plan of course since we are currently in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  Not to mention the land that was originally set aside for a 3rd elementary school is contaminated and the funds to clean it up were to come from AIG (’nuff said).   Another significant element in the equation:  the number of kids projected to live in Stapleton was severely underestimated.  By their estimates, in the next two years there will be 500 kids needing to enter kindergarten with no room in Stapleton’s schools.  That is a huge number.   I can’t help but think this underestimate stems from a similar problem that happened in Bradburn–marketing studies somehow concluded families wouldn’t be as heavily drawn to new urbanist communities as they actually are.

In Bradburn, our developer told us a marketing study conducted before they built the neighborhood didn’t come anywhere close to predicting how many families would move into the neighborhood.  The original plan for our neighborhood pool reflected this–there was no kiddie pool.  Once our developer realized how wrong that prediction was and that Bradburn was in fact a HUGE draw for families–about 80% of the homes here are occupied by families with kids under age 10–they changed the plans for the pool to include a kiddie pool.   In Stapleton, a survey found 40% of over 1,000 homes sampled are occupied with families with children under age 2! 

I hope future new urbanist developers learn from this FUBAR situation in Stapleton, and I would like to extend an invite to any parents in Stapleton who decide to move as a result of this mess–you are welcome to come to Bradburn Village in Westminster. We would love to have nice new, social neighbors. Our schools are great, and there’s plenty of room in them.

My husband  picked a book to start reading to our 7 year old daughter at bedtime.  It’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

God he’s cool.

I’m a geek and I’m proud! 

Last night my husband and I watched the movie “Role Models“.  In the movie there’s a kid who’s really into a group that stages mock fantasy “battles” a la Dungeons and Dragons.  They were obviously making fun of a real life group that does this called the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) which I mentioned to my husband assuming he knew all about it being the hearty geek he is.  I was horribly shocked to learn he had never heard of it and told him that his lack of knowledge in this area was a serious blow to his geek cred (since I not only knew about it but have attended more than one “war”). So we had some discussion about what sort of things you have to have in order to be a geek’s geek and here are some of the things we came up with.

1. Science fiction and/or fantasy must be your favorite genre of entertainment including but not limited to books, movies, and for extra geek cache: science fiction/fantasy conventions and extra points if you dress up, and even more extra points if you dress up as some obscure Sci fi or fantasy character such as Taarna from “Heavy Metal“.

2. Comic Books.  You don’t have to collect them but should have some passing familiarity with their style, tone, and content–enough to understand and find hilarious the opening scene in the movie “Chasing Amy”.

3. Must have read at least two (or all for the most cred) foundational science fiction/fantasy books:

—Neuromancer

—Snow Crash

—Dune

—The Martian Chronicles

—The Foundation Trilogy

—Stranger in a Strange Land

—Lord of the Rings

—Brave New World

—Ender’s Game

—Ringworld

—Hyperion

3.  You must be interested in science and/or technology and actively read news/magazines/non-fiction books/journals (such as Nature and Science) in that general area. 

4. Be able to quote and/or understand amusing quotes from classic sci fi/fantasy t.v. shows/movies such as “We’ll nuke the site from orbit, only way to be sure”, “What are you doing Dave?”, “It’s People!”, “You maniacs! You blew it all to hell! Damn You!”.

5. You get extra points if you actually managed to become a Dawinian fit geek and produced a homozygous geek (one having two seriously geeky parents).

We’ve had a very mild winter here in Colorado and last weekend we had a very nice 68 degree day with no wind (unusual for Jan-March is usually like living in a wind tunnel here then).  Everyone in my neighborhood came out of the woodwork and the parks were filled with neighbors chatting and kids playing.  It’s like that here pretty much every warm day.  I was walking home from an impromtu park party and two nice women walking their bikes called out to a group of us in the park (another park party LOL) “does anyone have a tire pump?”.  We have a very large, awesome open space area behind my neighborhood with extensive bike trails so frequently have people riding through the neighborhood to go to our businesses–usually for ice cream.  I told the women I had a pump and they could follow me to my house and use it.  So we start walking down the street and one of the women asks “So, what do you think about living here?”. 

We joke about this frequently in the neighborhood–that when people looking at Bradburn Village or people visiting ask this question (which is a lot) we freak them out with our enthusiasim–”Thisisthebestneighborhoodeveryouwanttolivehere!”.  We are afraid we scare people off since loving your neighborhood with a passion (especially in the suburbs) has been dead for some time in America–so people may think it’s freakish. 

I answered the woman’s question:

Me: “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else”

Visitor: “Why?”.    I pointed to the houses on my street,

Me: ”Because I am friends with every person in every house”. 

Visitor: [incredulous] “You know every person on your street?”

Me: “No, I know every person in nearly every single house in the entire neighborhood”.

Visitor: [thoughtful] “So it’s not just marketing.” (meaning she’s heard promotion materials for Bradburn or new urbanism in general).

Me: “Nope”. 

It’s not. 

My best friend is now 18 weeks pregnant with her first child.  I’ve been waiting 7 years since I went through the experience of having a spawn for her to get around to it so we could compare notes.  Really, I just wanted her to have a kid that I could enjoy, spoil rotten–then send home.  Sort of like an early grandkid.   We were discussing labor when the following conversation took place:

BFF: “Everyone says how horribly painful labor is”.

Me: “It wasn’t that bad for me”.

BFF: “But everyone says all these horror stories”.

Me: “Those are the women who didn’t have drugs.  I don’t understand it really, it’s not like you get a medal at the end.  You’re not a better person because you suffered horribly, I resent the culture that tells women a good birth is  a”natural” one.  Kidney stones are natural too.  Just because something is natural does not automatically make it good.”.

BFF: “Yeah, I think I’m self actualized enough, thanks, just give me the epidural”.

 LOL.

My best friend got married last year so I spent quite some time perusing bridal magazines–of which there are an unbelievable number.  I’m not very “girly” in most respects, but I do love weddings.  They combine two of my most favorite things in the universe–flowers and cake.  I still glance at them now and again because they give me good ideas for flower arrangements or fun party decorating ideas.  They are fun magazines to look through in my opinion, but there’s one thing about them I just don’t get–the models in the dress ads.

Considering the average age for a bride in the U.S. at first marriage is now 26, I am a little confused why so many of the bridal dress ads feature barely adolescent girls in desperate need of a sandwich who look like heroin addicts at the end of a bad bender.   This does not make me want to buy a dress.  It makes me want to call social services.

Every winter the garden or shelter magazines have a feature on “winter gardening”.  Winter gardening generally means you design your garden so that when it’s covered in snow and everything is generally brown, curled, and dead, it still retains some interest.  This usually means incorporating things like ornamental grasses and evergreens such as dwarf conifers or boxwood.  Sorry, it just doesn’t do it for me.  Come on!  Give the winter its dominance, I don’t even bother trying to hang on to some garden dignity from November to March.

This is not to say I don’t like ornamental grasses and conifers, it’s just I don’t expect them to hold up the garden in the month’s where IT’S DEAD–give it up man.  I will admit however, to checking out hellebores in the catalogs this winter because they do bloom in the dead of winter, but figured Colorado’s brutal dry winters would certainly make things difficult for them and decided to just spend my winters doing what I always do–counting down the days until the pansies appear again in March where I will promptly buy a bunch that will get snowed and iced and half will die but I don’t care.

 A colorful alley in Prospect New Town, Longmont Colorado

Two weeks ago I came across the very unpleasant news that Time Inc. had shuttered Cottage Living magazine.  Cottage Living was my all time favorite magazine and the first magazine I wrote a major feature for (on Prospect New Town).  I have been in love with Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado since I first saw the very first houses going up in 1996.  When I first started writing as a freelance writer I thought about what would be the ultimate article to write, and I thought I would like to write something about Prospect New Town.

I’d been getting Cottage Living for a year or so and it was one of the only shelter magazines that had articles about different neighborhoods and communities in the U.S. (which is one of the reasons I loved it), so I thought one day, “Why don’t I query them about Prospect?”.  Prospect is so different from anything else out there and it seems like almost no one knows about it (although it was on the cover and had a large feature article in Dwell magazine).  I emailed a query and photos to Cottage Living’s travel editor and figured I’d never hear from them again. 

A lot of time in freelance writing, you send a query–which is basically a description of the article you would like to write and your credentials for doing so–to a magazine and get….silence.  Editors are so deluged by queries they often just don’t respond when the answer is “no”, so most freelance writers send out queries they never hear back about.  Sufficed to say I was very surprised when Cottage Living’s travel editor called me that night.

A few months later, I met the travel editor and the photographer at Prospect to watch the photo shoot which was very interesting and fun.  We went to dinner at Prospect’s awesome BBQ joint.  They were great guys and fun to work with.  The article came out a year later and I was very happy with it.  I ended up working with Cottage Living on two other neighborhood articles, one of which–about the Harmony Village cohousing community in Golden–was never published due to changes in the format of the magazine (happens sometimes).  Cottage Living was always very professional, always paid on time (can be a challenge with some magazines), and was a great magazine to work with, not to mention, awesome.  I am going to miss them.  

The Not So Bright Burmese Python

In college I worked in a pet store and spent some time managing the reptile section.  This occasioned a multitude of interesting situations, probably the most interesting/crazy was the extraction of a 6 foot beach towel from a 12 foot Burmese python.

One bright morning (every morning is bright in Phoenix, Arizona) a lovely young teenage girl and her very nice mother came into the store and asked about the care and feeding of Burmese pythons.  It seems the young girl had purchased a Burmese python from her biology teacher who could no longer keep it.  Let me give you a few details about this particular species.  First, they are huge.  I mean HUGE.  Females can easily reach 15-20 feet and a girth of more than a foot.  Males are smaller but still huge (10-15 feet).  This huge, muscular body is ruled by a brain the size of a nut.  They are beautiful but potentially dangerous snakes and they defecate like a horse.

I spent a long time talking to mom and daughter about safety (never feed animal by yourself, NEVER), and what type of cage he would need, how snakes are ecothermic and need a heat source to digest their food and keep up their immune system.  They got what we in the reptile industry refer to as the “deader is better” speech–captive snakes should be fed dead rodents off tongs instead of live rodents which (believe it or not) can inflict significant bite damage to snakes.  Nice mom and daughter buy book on Burmese and one large frozen rat (which I instructed them to thaw out in a plastic bag floating in hot water–just like pork chops!, yes the reptile world is odd).

30 minutes later the phone rings and it’s nice mom who in a panicked voice says they thawed out the rat and dropped it in the cage and the snake missed it and grabbed the towel they had put inside the cage to keep the snake warm instead.  Putting aside my urge to point out blankets don’t work for animals that don’t generate their own body heat, I told nice mom to watch the snake and once he released the towel from his “death bite” he’ll sniff around and realize it’s not food and let it go.  She says thanks and hangs up.  Phone rings again a few minutes later and it’s nice mom again. I overestimated the brain power of their Burmese.  “He’s swallowing the towel!!  What should we do???”.  I advised her to take the snake to an emergency vet because if he succeeds in swallowing the towel it will cause a deadly impaction and will have to be surgically removed.  She says “Oh Crap!”, hangs up.

A few minutes later I hear screaming tires in the parking lot and look out the door to see now wild-haired, wild-eyed nice mom, nice teenager, nice brother, and nice father bolting out of a minivan, the back of which contains the not so bright, towel consuming Burmese python.  Mom runs in and says they didn’t have enough time to get to vet and that we were closer is there anything we can do???  I thought for a minute and had what is colloquially referred to as “an epiphany”.

A few days ago I had read an article in one of the reptile hobby magazines about big snake bites (”big” means larger than 6 feet and greater around than 6 inches).  The article was interesting–albeit horrific–and had a large picture of a python skull clearly showing its large, recurved–Jesus you don’t want that thing to bite you–teeth.  I realized the only thing preventing us from pulling the towel out was the fact the teeth pointed backward (evolutionarily speaking you don’t want your prey backing out of your mouth while you are swallowing it, hence this adaptation).  I grabbed a snake hook, which is like a golf club with a large metal hook on the end instead of a flattened head, and rushed outside.  If J.J. Abrams were directing this scene this is where the slow motion running would come in. 

I directed another employee to hold the snake’s  head (it took him both hands and they didn’t touch if that gives you an idea of this thing’s size), slipped the metal bar between the snake’s top teeth and the towel, and pulled the towel right out.  Nice mom and daughter are crying happy and nice dad gives me 20 bucks (not necessary but nice).  I fake blow smoke off the top of the snake hook and saunter back into the store (kidding, I just walked back in with the slimy hook and washed it). 

So kids, the moral of the story is: learn the basic anatomy of your pets in case you are ever called upon to extract something from them.