I am taking up residence at the local coffeeshop. Please forward all mail.

I have gone daily for the past three days to the coffeeshop near my house and am beginning to feel like I live there. It's such an odd little place--definitely a haven for the hippie/hipsters of the area, who all ride in on their cruisters wearing their vintage, thrift-store finds and talk loudly on their cell phones. A good number of graduate students also frequent the place.

Last night, I carried over my giant Scrabble board and the guy sitting at the bar felt compelled to commentate/bullshit about the game. His claim that seven-letter bingoes are called "Scrabbles" made me doubt everything else that came out of his mouth, but I was too out of it to correct him and just smiled and nodded instead.

This coffeeshop seems to attract a rather large number of self-absorbed, self-righteous preachers in the evenings for some reason, and this particular character reminded me of why I stopped going to 3 Roots for quite a while (there were those people and also the copious numbers of Anthropolgists who were frequenting the place, turning it into a distraction-fest and popularity contest). I don't mind the enthusiastic hipsters (an oxymoron in Seattle, to be sure, but here, it's endearing), but the preachers are too much. Next time, I will have to ask him if he wants to make good on his talk and actually play a game.

Oh, and he was short. Like usual.

I would go further afield, but it's hot.

Guest Entry by My Dad

Last weekend, my father completed the 204-mile Seattle to Portland bike ride. He spent a couple of months training for it, and at one point when I called to see how things were going, he said, "I've never trained for anything before." So it was his first big, trained-for bike ride, which is pretty exciting for someone who just celebrated his 60th birthday. Anyway, his story about the ride is below the cut.

( Read more... )

This book seriously upsets me.

I'm still working on The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler. I am reading a section about major problems with suburban design, and how suburbs disenfranchise children, the elderly, and people without cars, because they have been designed with cars in mind, and not pedestrians or bicyclists.

Perhaps it doesn't take much to convince me that suburbs are a huge problem because I have no car and I was extremely fortunate to grow up in a place where I was *not* so seriously disenfranchised.

I'm reminded of some slightly lighter reading--A Walk in the Woods, where Bill Bryson talks about an expedition he takes to get to a store partway through his hike along the Appalachian trail--through ditches, over fences, along busy streets. Much, much more dangerous than most of the hiking Bryson does along the actual trail.

How is it that our nation came to underwrite the creation of so many enormous superhighways, but cannot seem to build sidewalks or pedestrian-friendly places? Well, that's what TGON is about. But seriously, this book makes me want to read more about places that are doing a better job. Of course, Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums would have us understand that globalization and international monetary policies have ruined any hopes for such things.

Lo, the humanity.