Missing: affordable housing

A few weeks ago I put up my first yard sign ever: Yes for Homes, advocating for passage of Proposition 1, the Seattle Housing Levy. The seven-year levy on property owners pays for affordable housing site acquisition, rehabilitation, operating, and a bit of rental and homebuyers' assistance, and it has been approved three times in the past by the city's voters. One of the properties developed with levy money is the Stone Way apartments, just a block and a half away from my home.

I feel strongly about housing as a right that a country and a city as wealthy as ours can afford to guarantee. It's one of our most powerful tools to guarantee people a minimum standard of living, to ensure that my neighbors at least live well enough that I don't need to be ashamed. That may be far too little, but it's at least a floor on what we should ask of ourselves.

The levy has been shown to leverage multiple federal and state dollars for every dollar contributed by Seattle homeowners. So I went out and canvassed at our local farmer's market last month for the levy last month, and I expect to participate in a phone bank next week.

A few days ago, someone defaced our yard sign, scrawling "Tax Me More" across it. I turned it around so the clean side faced the street. This morning, it was gone. Someone must have come up into my garden and pulled it out. I replaced it with the one I'd displayed at the farmer's market. But if Seattle voters uproot the levy itself, it will be much harder to fill the gap.

More on sleep

B reminded me about a fascinating phenomenon of the pre-electricity era: segmented sleep, in which people would go to sleep for three or four hours, then wake around midnight for a while, then go back to sleep until morning. The period between sleeps was not anxious, like insomnia, but could be very productive. I thought the NY Times ran a magazine cover story a few years back about sleep which mentioned this, and cited Benjamin Franklin as someone who came up with significant innovations during the wakeful hours in the dark, but the only piece I can find is this one. I woke up at 3:40 this morning and thought of it, all excited - it would be great to be able to use that time! I have woken before in the night, but usually do feel anxious. That could be because I thought I was costing myself sleep, though...

Sleep and the good life

My book club is reading Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, which I suspect may come up here again - last night I couldn't stop reading bits aloud to E, much to his annoyance. One of the chapters is on Sleep and Stress, and notes that in 1910 (before electric lighting) the average American got nine hours of sleep per night. That's down to 7.5 hours today (or should I say, tonight), but lately I am right about at 1910 levels, which feels fantastic.


I go up to bed around 10, am asleep between 10:30 and 11, and get up about 7:30. It's hard to imagine how I could ever sustain that with a regular job - much less with kids - but for now I hope to keep it up. The only downside is a certain amount of guilt about whether I could be achieving more, but Sapolsky's book is helping to bolster my conviction that I'll come out ahead (and significantly happier) this way. (Another fact, from the chapter on Stress and Aging, is that elderly people are happier than younger ones - they aren't as bothered by negative images or events, and enjoy positive ones more. Amazing!)

This weekend overall has felt like a near-perfect life balance: propping up the tomatoes and reading for my Budgeting class, playing hockey and going out to dinner at Sitka and Spruce yesterday; talking to friends in Boston and Berlin, leafing through the NYT, working on my paid probation project, and jogging with my friend B today. Tonight we'll go next door to M's to try out her corn chowder - which means I'd better get started with dessert coffee cake and salad soon. Hurray for the glorious fall, and for as many more months as possible of this relaxed pace!

Electrical outlets

This morning I was thinking about plugs: E's slightly older Dell laptop has a two-pronged plug, while my fairly new Toshiba has three prongs. How come? Here's a good explanation. Basically, the round prong/hole on the bottom grounds the appliance so that if an internal wire comes loose, you don't shock yourself, potentially fatally.

That makes me wonder what the rate is of people hurting or killing themselves in all the old apartments in New England that I and other friends rented during school and afterward. My sister lived in a 100+ year old house in Providence with sloping hardwood floors, which I'm sure had no three-prong plugs, and significantly younger buildings in Somerville and Cambridge lacked them also.

Three-pronged outlets: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timporter/189874982/
(This first, lovely set of outlets I turned up on Flickr are from the Headlands Center for the Arts, where I lived and worked during the summer of 1996. It's the only place I've encountered a ghost, that I know of. But for some reason I can't get .gifs to publish.)

I took a great class on Batteries and Bulbs in the 5th grade, but either we didn't cover that, or 1986-7 is just too freaking long ago. (Last night at a stop on the Fremont Art Walk in which our neighbor was showing photos, one of her co-exhibitors was born in 1992. Yikes.) I'm pretty sure it did explain to me how I had killed my barely-used Smurf record player two years earlier by plugging it straight into the (240-volt-current) wall when we got to Malaysia.

Favela Rising

Oh yeah! I finally got around to watching my friend's friend Jeff Zimbalist's documentary on the powerfully positive Afro-Reggae cultural-political movement in the slums of Rio, Favela Rising. I thought it was great, with terrifically likeable characters, including Jeff himself in the bonus feature.


The film's website: http://www.favelarising.com/

And today Rio gets the 2016 Olympics... another chance to capture a rising tide to lift all boats.

Pigskin disenchantment

Football season is underway, at both the college and professional levels, and has begun to dominate the Sports Center clips that E watches to put himself to sleep at night. It's hard to say that I was ever a serious fan, but for a long time rooting for the (other Washington) Redskins - and appreciating football in all its forms - was part of my self-definition. I liked to pull out the story of watching Super Bowl XXII with my dad, broadcast live on a Monday morning in Tokyo, as an indicator of how football had come to mean something to me. My dad worked pretty long hours, and it was exciting to me to get excited with him. It was the first victory of a Black quarterback in the Super Bowl, which must have meant a lot to some people in the District of Columbia - he's still the only person to claim that distinction, in a sport that still underrepresents Blacks at QB, and in leadership generally. Once it was pretty clear that the Redskins would beat the Broncos, my dad drove me to school, and we listened to the end of the game on American Armed Forces Entertainment Service radio.


In his prime: http://artfiles.art.com/images/-/Doug-Williams---Looking-For-Receiver-Photograph-C12961613.jpeg

I also think football is a smart sport, fun to watch, with great adrenaline moments. And football lends itself to great dramatic stories of teamwork and triumph, like Friday Night Lights, as well or better than other sports do.

But this year my negative feelings about the sport are on the rise. There's been a lot of press about dementia and brain damage, as well as damage to the rest of the body, among former players in the NFL and even at the college level and younger. It's not really new news, and it's very consistent with what you might imagine for guys who go out there and smash into each other week after week.

I suppose if I'm honest, I'd admit that the waning fortunes of the Redskins, and my lack of a fan community or means to watch them regularly, contribute as much to my dispassion as does my distaste for the long-term injury potential. (After all, I go out and play street hockey every week, despite the high frequency of ACL tears and other traumatic events in that arena.) As an aside, I've never liked the name Redskins either, with its unsavory freight of racial bias.

The upshot is, I'm not really looking for a way back in. I'd like to cheer for the Huskies, and I'd definitely be up for a few hours of flag or touch at Thanksgiving, but for the most part, I don't need football to be a part of my life.

Horse chestnuts, and Glee

I picked up a handful of horse chestnuts during my last WP excursion - they are so beautiful, glossy and brown, and I couldn't remember for sure how and if they were different from regular chestnuts, which I have nice memories of eating warm on the street in Japan and elsewhere. It turns out that they are not edible and in fact slightly poisonous.


Horse chestnuts and leaves: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8340239@N07/3633779968/

The University of Minnesota link says that buckeyes are most prevalent, though often mistaken for horse chestnuts - which I may have done. When K, who is from Ohio, got married the May before last, we made hundreds of delicious chocolate-peanut butter buckeyes with only a visual relationship to the real thing.

Last night I watched my second episode of Glee on TV. Perversely, I was happy not to enjoy it as much as the first one I watched, since I don't really need to be tied to another guilty pleasure. Too much country music and actual show tunes on this one, and the plot seemed exaggerated without being as amusingly absurd. (Less Election, more High School Musical, although I'll admit to never having seen the latter.) Still, a good break from Economic Development Finance. I wonder how much of my textbook has been turned upside-down by the recent turmoil in capital markets?

Chinese gooseberries

We got a half-pint of something called "kiwi berries" in our biweekly produce delivery today. (We use New Roots Organics, which aggregates from organic farms, finding what I think is a nice balance between patronizing locally and providing variety.) Usually the sheet they include describes anything unusual in the mix, so I wonder if I might be behind the curve on this one. The first Google hit is a company that claims to have been the first to start using the name kiwi berry as opposed to baby kiwi or hardy kiwi.

http://www.kiwiberry.com/kiwi%20berries%20css.htm

Kiwi fruit themselves were called Chinese gooseberries when they first came to the United States, and became kiwi fruit (after the bird of New Zealand) for marketing reasons. So it's funy to me that their little brethren have a branding kerfluffle to deal with as well.

I had two cavities filled this morning, so my mouth hasn't de-numbed enough to risk biting into one until just now. They're pretty good! A lot like a true kiwi, without the mess of the peel, although the fuzzless skin is a little rough and tasteless. Also, the firmness and flavor varies a lot from berry to berry. I tend to prefer (as with other fruits) the slightly firmer, tarter ones. I could see slicing these in half to add a little zany-ness to a salad, since E doesn't like nuts (my former favorite) as a topper.

In other news, a state application for federal funds that I worked on was not successful, I just found out today. I think the project had some problems, but it's a bummer, because it was for a type of service that's badly needed in Washington. Of course, it's badly needed elsewhere, too, so I'm interested to see who won, and how well they use the money.

My second year of grad school starts tomorrow, and I'm reading John Rawls on social justice. I skipped that course at Harvard, where it was very popular, and is about to go multimedia: http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/jmr/
I'm pretty sure I'm still not interested in political philosophy, and I'm hoping UW makes it more case-based, addressing specific real-world dilemmas rather than hypothetical rationalization.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake

My cousin K is allergic to dairy, so E picked up some sour cream substitute before K and her husband came over for brunch this weekend. But it turns out that its main ingredient was coconut, which K is also allergic to. So we improvised with soy milk, and I found this recipe online (adapted slightly) as a way to use some of the faux sour cream. It's delicious, and the house smells like baking.

Cake:
1 c. sour cream
1 t. baking soda
1/2 c. butter, softened
1 c. sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1 t. vanilla
1 3/4 c. flour
2 t. baking powder

Topping:
1/2 c. brown sugar
2 t. cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350.

Grease and flour an 8 x 8 pan. Combine sour cream and baking soda in a bowl, mix to blend. Set aside (it will double in bulk). Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla, mix well. Combine flour and baking powder in a bowl. Alternately mix in portions of the flour mixture and the sour cream mixture to the batter, ending with flour.

Spread half of the batter in the pan. Sprinkle with half of the topping mixture. Cover with remaining batter. Sprinkle with the rest of the topping mixture.

Bake for 25 minutes.

Late September, Woodland Park

When I'm the one to walk the dog in the afternoon, I always like to take her around the little path along the fence that rings the zoo, where we can catch a glimpse of the elephants. I'm not sure why. We never get much of a view, and it is generally the same – a bit of massive ear, or shoulder, or rear. And I am not thrilled about the theory of zoos with their too-small enclosures, exposed by design. Can the elephants be happy? But I like to see them anyway. It's reassuring, maybe, and always feels a little like I'm getting away with something: free elephants! Today they were out of sight.

It's nice to get back to the park after a few days away – although I realize as I write this that it's been longer than that: I haven't taken L for her afternoon constitutional since before our week-long East Coast romp. Can that be? What was I doing on Friday, I wonder?

On the other side of the city (Capitol Hill): http://www.flickr.com/photos/knoopie/3963019765/

E's parents asked when they were here the week before that whether the leaves change in Seattle, in the fall. I couldn't remember what that looks like here, or what the timing is like, although this will be our third. It seems incredible how quickly it has gone; another year and I will have been here as long as I was in New York, which is as long as I've been anywhere uninterrupted. (Cambridge/Somerville has a claim on 5 years, but split into three chunks, not counting summers away.)

So today I tried to notice: there are yellowed and dry brown leaves scattered all across the sidewalks and the grass. Most of the trees just look brushed with yellow – one tall one aflame with red all down one side – not yet consumed with that color. Not just the pines and needled shrubs, but many of the other trees are still fully green. It hasn't been raining. But the cool air and the wind feel like fall. I feel ready for orange piles of pumpkins at the store and the smell of fires.

db in Volunteer Park: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wesbran/3961264931/in/photostream/

It's impossible to resist the change of seasons as a metaphor for aging. Yesterday I went to the Decibel Festival event in the park, on my own, because E doesn't like thumpy electronic music and I don't seem to know or meet anyone else who does anymore. The time when I went dancing every week, sometimes multiple times, is two moves and the better part of a decade behind me in San Francisco. I still love it so much – it's the simplest, most fail-safe way I know to find bliss, outside of a pill – but going out to late night DJs just isn't a good fit with my life anymore. I need to sleep a lot, and it's a real effort to stay up. In Seattle you have to be a morning person to maximize your exposure to the sun through the long dark winters. It was sad not to have people to share this annual event with, although I felt the same good feeling just moving by myself, with a handful and then several handfuls of other dancers down in front of the small stage. It was a warm afternoon, the perfect setting.