Winding down

I had a funny thing happen on Friday. You may have noticed that, like most people, I have a site counter on this blog -- I like to keep track of where my readers come from. Over the past week, I noticed a decided upsurge in readership, but much of it was coming from one IP address, not far from here. I, of course, became intensely curious about this person who seemed to be logging on several times a day and who ALWAYS seemed to be on when I was on. Can you hear it coming yet? It took me about three days to realize that (I guess when a version had changed on the meter) the meter had started logging visits from my IP. So, the moral? My biggest fan is.....me! This, and some comments I read last week about blogging in general, suggesting that what we're doing is finding a way to authenticate ourselves by saying 'publicly' all of the things that we couldn't just verbalize to friends because then we'd come off as self-absorbed, has led me to my conclusion.

I'm sure all four of you will be gobsmacked by this, but I'm going to wind down with this blog. I think that my architectural/climatic/spatial rants probably have a place, but that place is not here. I have to marshal my time and energies.

This will be my last post here. I'll leave the archive as I think that some of it is actually pretty good writing and, as my own biggest fan, I do enjoy reading some of it from time to time.

As far as I know, the book promo blog will start up sometime in June. I won't link to it from here, but if anyone who reads here would like the address, just drop me a line via email and I'll let you know when it goes live.

I've enjoyed the experience of writing this, and some of the people I've met through it and the comments. I've also been fascinated by some of the longtime readers from places I've never visited who have chosen to remain anonymous. I like that you seem to like what I say, and imagine we would be good friends if we met.

This blog has led me to some....very....interesting.....experiences. It's been fun.

A bientot.

Deadwood

I've been wanting to watch Deadwood for months. The video store never has it. I think they've lost it and won't admit it. So today I committed another sin (yet another...though far from my worst) and walked through the door of Blockbuster to get it. I hate that place. I hate the part of town it's in, too. What is it with West Waterloo? People don't say 'hello' or 'please' or 'thank you' in stores. They keep you waiting for no good reason. Parking lots are treacherous. I waved a frantic 'thank you' of my own to some guy who came within centimetres of mowing down a couple of my kids. I had a talk with my 11 year old on the way home. Had she noticed how different things were in that stretch of the city? She thought she had, though she tactfully pointed out that my fatigue may have been talking a bit. I asked her whether she thought it possible that things like the layout of streets, widths of roads, design of shopping centres could be responsible for changing who people were. I didn't really expect her to know what the hell I was talking about, but I was curious to see what she'd say. She told me that she'd had much this conversation with one of her friends, and they had agreed that what neighbourhoods need is places where people want to gather. If people see one another more frequently, they have to talk to them. Then they get to know them. Then they're more decent to one another. Smart kid. So smart that she ended up getting some loot at Blockbuster as well, and now I still can't watch Deadwood because the screen has been occupied for the last couple of hours.

Nature, children, optimism, and Louv

In spite of the fact that I'm running on vapours at this point in the day, I managed to grab an hour after writing my way through about 100 hours of furlough to finish off the Louv book. It's a great message. Kids have fallen out of touch with nature. We're actually losing our knowledge of natural history entirely because it isn't taught anymore. Even in the academy, what passes for biology is discussion of molecules. Fascinating discussion, mind you, but nary a whole animal in sight. I remember sitting down once with the dean of science and the chair of biology at my university to talk about a joint future in animal research. The bio chair opined that whole animal biology was a thing of the past. I was told in no uncertain terms that unless I wanted to talk molecules, there was no common ground. Louv's argument also touched a memory for me of an informal study showing that most biology undergraduate students at the University of Toronto had never been on a camping trip. What they knew of nature they'd learned from books and computers.

Louv thinks all of this matters for all kinds of reasons (and I agree) but the main argument of the book is that kids need contact with nature to be healthy. I think he's right about that -- there's a load of data to back that claim. What I don't know is why that is. What is it that nature gives us? And then my cyberhead wonders (and here's where Louv cringes) whether there's any way to simulate it. I know. Seems like some kind of regressive step. Perhaps even blasphemy. But the thing of it is, I really don't see what Louv proposes ever actually taking place. He espouses some form of return to the old Garden City of Ebenezer Howard. It didn't work last time -- in fact it was one step on the road to Le Corbusier disasterland -- but Louv says that's because we didn't do it right -- we emphasized the wrong parts of the idea. We tried to do the Garden City without the Garden. Anyway, whether Howard was right or wrong (and coincidentally enough I'd just read Jane Jacobs doing a merry lambasting of Howard earlier today), I just don't see what he proposes, a return to village life in some kind of rural hinterland, replete with small agricultural collectives, alternative energy, etc. etc. ever coming to fruition. For one thing, I think that things are coming crashing down too hard and too fast. I think that long before Louv re-engineers North American culture, we've got this small problem of 7 or 8 billion people in the rest of the world, starving for resources, water, energy breathing down our necks. I don't see them putting up with such a bold experiment, at least while they have lots of guns to point at us. If there's any way out of the morass (and, as I've said recently, I'm not sure there should be or that I even want there to be) then I'd put my money on technological cures. We can't have back what we've blown. We've kicked ourselves out of the Garden of Eden. Oops. But if we can figure out how our love of nature works, why it matters, what it's for, and how to simulate it, we may be able to help ourselves a little.

Chris Jordan

Take a moment to look at these photos. Chilling. Beautiful.

All is getting righter

I managed to run. It wasn't pretty -- my legs felt like concrete -- but I did the obligatory 31 minutes (don't ask) and lived. Not only this, but I made the executive decision to work from home today, even though vast numbers of children have been bouncing around above my head (a friend came over for a while with her 2 kids, bringing yummy hummus with her). Not only this, but then with a mighty, authoritative rap on the door, the postman arrived bearing a new coffee maker. In my opinion, the only home coffee maker worth having is the Bodum electric vacuum press and mine died some time ago. There's been some kind of bodumlicious coffeemaker catastrophe, possibly linked to their having switched production the China, the bastards, and having the already somewhat precarious machine suffer a serious decline in quality control -- rumours of units shipped with fairly substantial parts -- like the bottom of the jug -- missing. In desperation, I turned to ebay where I found a very nice man in Boca Raton who owned 10 of these. I ordered two -- one for a neighbour but I'm tempted, now that I see the shiny cartons, to keep them both for when the new one dies (there's a universal law in my house that coffeemakers can only last one year).

See what's happening here? Instead of getting pithy commentary on space and the environment, you're getting the sordid desiderata of my not so exciting life. Just you wait until that new site goes live...then I'll be full of righteous anger and stuff.

Dream time

I'm supposed to be running through the park right now, but I'm hunched over a coffee in the basement instead. It was an interesting night. A neighbour dropped over to tell me that he'd noticed a kid on roller blades who looked like he was sizing up the bikes in our driveway, so I spent some time securing them all in the bike garage. Then, when I finally got to bed at 1215, trying to outwait my 17 year old so that I knew she'd be in bed and not somewhere else, I could hear very faint banging noises outside the window. So I spent a few minutes bobbing up and down, wondering when the threshold would be crossed for me to wander the yard in my stylish silk pyjamas, potentially sending insomniac neighbours into paroxysms of laughter. Finally to bed at 1230, and then awake again by 3 to discover two toddlers in bed with me. One of them felt it was time for breakfast because he could 'see light in the front yard'. The other one intent on palpating my kidneys vigorously and repeatedly with her feet. We have a big bed. Our bed is so big that I actually complain to my wife that I sometimes feel as though she's in a different province (ok, well actually she is right now). Yet last night, it wasn't big enough for the three of us. The boy drifted off to sleep for a bit, but dreamed audibly that somebody was trying to feed him 'evil food' (that's what we call food containing dairy as he has potentially fatal allergies). The girl kept complaining in her sleep that somebody was 'taking her spot,' which is one of her deepest fears as she caroms through her day. Problem being: all spots seem to be hers. By 5 I felt like giving up. My son was wandering the bedroom, refusing to accept that all sane people were still sleeping, wanting his 'wake-up' cup, his breakfast, a story. My daughter, frustrated that his racket was disrupting her neurotic nightmares, wandered back to her bed. For 15 blissful minutes, son fell asleep on the carpet and I went into a brief coma on the bed, interrupted by my own odd dream that I was being repeatedly run over by a bulldozer. We came downstairs, toddlers and I, and the three of us made a human sandwich on the couch for a few minutes, until the older kids started to straggle down the stairs. My 9 year old told me she had dreamed that she fell down the stairs and, when she reached the bottom, some kind of animal took a bite out of her head. It made a sound like a crunching apple. My 11 year old sat in utter silence until the time came for her to get on her bike and go to school. This reminded me that she will soon be a teenager, and I can expect days and days of this silent treatment.

Now the sitter is here, calm, rested, relaxed. And I'm supposed to be home from my run and on my way to the office. And to think I have it easy....