Humanize the Earth!

Regula’s new studio

Regula Frey is opening her movement studio in Wilmette. She’s teaching yoga, pilates, body rolling and feldenkrais. Check it out! RegulasJoyOfMovement.com

brain surgery

My good friend and housemate John Stoner is about to have brain surgery. Check out his amazing post. Go John!

She’s Geeky: An Women’s Tech (un)conference

In February this year, I had the pleasure of working with Kaliya, co-facilitating Recent Changes Camp Portland. She now announces She’s Geeky: An Women’s Tech (un)conference:

I am producing another unconference this fall. It is for women working in technology called She’s Geeky. It is October 22-23 in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum.
…
We have three simple goals with the event.

• Exchange skills and learning from women from diverse fields of technology.
• Discuss topics about women and technology.
• Connect the diverse range of women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky fields.

Conference Location Decided!

I’m very excited to have the Conference right here in my neighborhood. The full (updated) invitation:

Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club at Carrillo’s, planting day report

As I’ve written about before, today was planting day for the Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club at the Carrillo’s corner store, and the day couldn’t have been better, with beautiful sunshine and temps in the 70s.

On Thursday, Sarah Kaplan and I picked up the plants and tools at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, provided to us by Greencorps, through my involvement with the Chicago Conservation Corps. We each had a full bike trailer on the way home, with the wind at our backs. Fun!

Today we had a great turn-out, with Mr. and Mrs. Carrillo and their daughter Laura Rodriquez and Laura’s husband Rick, a neighbor from the 2400 block of Whipple, Mars (from Wicker Park, who found about the event through this website) and her mother (from Nebraska), and 5 of us from the HUB Housing Co-op, where I live.

We had 24 1-gallon pots, 3 each of 3 kinds of daylillies, 3 each of 2 kinds of hostas, 3 each of 2 kinds of bleedings hearts and 3 coralbells, and one flat of echanacia.  I was envisioning planting all of these is a fairly small area, removing the grass to do so, giving a really big impact in one dense area, or perhaps two smaller dense areas (the store is on the corner so has parkway in two places).  What actually happened was a sort-of dense area around one tree with 3 hostas and about 10 echanacias (these with no grass in-between, with 3 bleeding hearts nearby, planted in holes surrounded by grass (we didn’t take out hte grass except right where we planted), and then non-dense planting of all the rest.  Two or three trees had about 3 plants around each, with echancias to fill in, and some of the bleeding hearts ended up sort of off by themselves in the grass.

What’s really interesting about this in retrospect is that when a neighbor sees a full-on large-scale parkway garden, they may think it’s beyond their skills, experience or financial other means.  when they see two bleeding hearts in an otherwise solid stretch of 50 sq ft of grass, maybe that feels more accessible and they can do something like that themselves, without anything from me or other neighbors or the City.  That would be really cool!

Another thing about the day that was really cool was the amount of conversation that happened between neighbors.  Some of them came over to our place to see our compost and rainbarrels and talk about greenroofs and other goodness.  I really look forward to seeing these folks again, and I’m excited about the connections that were formed.

So we’re going to do another planting day in June, on Whipple, in a smaller area.  I need to check my calendar and the put in another order with Marissa.

How to Disappear by Pete Leki

Please go read this very short book by Pete Leki: How to Disappear. I love it. I’ve also been working on a wiki with Michael here How to Disappear Wiki. We’re not sure yet what’ll come of the wiki project, but we’d really like to see this book widely read.

linkage

Shout out to Jon Husband! And over at omidayr.net, there’s a conversation going on about connecting existing networks, and blogging as part of that. As a result, two new blogs were started, OurSelf and David Braden’s blog and then links from the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Neighbor Networking. There’s also a reference there to elearnspace and Knowledge Collaboration City - Critical Questions & Answer Maps of Citizen & Netizen.  Cool to weave things together folks!

Miss Shuganah’s Mutterings

I’d like to welcome Debbie to her new blog: Miss Shuganah’s Mutterings

post-dinner musings

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Chicago Conservation Corps leadership training orientation and met some cool people. Tonight I had dinner with Julie and some of her friends connected with Beyond Today in the North Center neighborhood. Beyond Today is a really cool local environmental group. Here are some of my take-aways from our dinner:

• There are people that form corporations so that people can invest their retirement money in real estate (can’t do it directly). Why don’t we do that in a neighborhood and form community-funded co-ops? We can! (hopefully)
• A community calendar is hard to maintain by hand. WikiMaas does a great job of it using a wiki. Cool.
• Hey, and why doesn’t Chicago have a city-wiki. Actually, it turns out that it does: WikiChicago.  Unfortunately, it’s not OpenEdit, which means you have to not only sign up for an account before editing or leaving a comment, but you have to verify an email address, which is really, really annoying and will no doubt reduce participation.
• When two people own a house and also rent to others, not only can they change their percentage ownership from 50/50 to 51/49 or 60/40 or whatever over time if one pays less rent than the other (by prior agreement, of course), but a renter can go perhaps become a partner this way as well.  From 50/50/0 to 49/49/2 over time?  And then 48/48/4?  And eventually 33/33/33?  Or more partners?  Maybe it doesn’t even need to be a co-op?  Can just be a partnership?  Lots of questions.  Cool stuff.
• Beyond Today is a really cool neighborhood organization.  They host green dinners, play soccer with neighbors in the park, organize protests against west nile spraying, have cool website, and much more.  And they can use some basic help that with stuff that I know about.  The wiki calendering above is one.  A wordpress blog is another.  I learned a lot from them.  I love the idea of them hosting related blogs by neighbors, and then having an editor or three distill ideas from those blogs down to very short blurbs for their mainpage, linked back to the source, of course.  Excellent idea.
• I want to show the Upward Spiral movie some more.

This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.

www.silo.net www.silomessage.org silosmessage-ny.net

Danny Zuckerbrot – on the Mideast Crisis

I am a Jew and a child of the holocaust. That means that most of the grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and family friends I might have known were cruelly tortured and killed before I was born. It means I grew up knowing the scars on my father’s body, the memories left by the whips of the concentration camp guards. I knew his limbs twisted from their beatings. It means I will never forget the numbers tattooed into his arm that marked him as a slave, and less than a slave. It means I will always remember the nightmares that haunted his dreams.

It also means that I am descended from people whose neighbors in every generation for hundreds of years have turned on them in pogroms, and massacres. Before Columbus sailed, we were driven from Spain. Two centuries before that from England. It is a story of exile and rejection that has been two thousand years in the telling; nor has it ended. In the tranquil and tolerant city where I grew up there were places with signs that said no Jews or Dogs.

I understand those who cannot trust their well being even to their apparent allies. I know in my bones who it is that will end up being the scapegoat, the fall guy, the accused. I am a Jew, in the same way that I am a part of the family I was born into. And I find myself one of those who asks; why didn’t they protest when a thousand missiles where launched at us from our neighbors house?

I feel all that is true and I ask myself isn’t it right to defend yourself? Isn’t it right to defend your children?

I have no wisdom to illuminate this situation only this register and this observation:

I have to defend my children, my family, my people. But who are my children? Who are my family, and my people?

My heart is pierced by every bullet that rips apart that one who, like me, simply finds themselves thrown into a game they didn’t choose. I am torn apart with every single person who cowers in fear or shakes their fist in helplessness. Even if I would, the tears I shed for that child cruelly slaughtered by a bomb don’t know how to distinguish between Jew and Muslim, between white or black, or Hindu or Sikh.

This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.