My Blog

The Evil Athens Land Trust

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:23:35 -0400

Sounds like a pretty benign group, raising money to buy affordable housing for low income families and to purchase land to keep it undeveloped. Local politics are always exciting though and there is more to the Athens Land Trust than that. A few months ago our neighborhood realized they had purchased a vacant lot on our street and planned to build a house. The lot had been for sale for years but no one wanted to buy it for a house because it dips down steeply off the street because its dirt was used to build up the lot next door. The guy next to it had offered to buy it just to ensure it remained vacant so the deer, hawks, rabbits, snakes etc could continue to use it.

We live on a middle class street with a lot of 40 year old brick homes and a few new ones craftsmen ones like mine, not a place that needs revitalization through government subsidized housing for low-income families. However, when we expressed opposition to the land trust, they basically accused us of being racist, classist bigots who were unwilling to help the poor.

As taxpayers in the county, we paid to support the half million a year this land trust gets as well as our sales tax dollars that helped give a 2.1 million fund to them for land preservation. Our middle class neighbors were willing to pitch in $25,000 more to buy the land from them or even to donate that land back to the land trust for preservation but they were unwilling. They also would not use any of that 2.1 million for the lot. It has just been sitting there.

Turns out our street had a covenant that auto renews and an architectural committee so we paid a lawyer to update that document and got a new architectural committee together. The land trust was condescending and blew us off at their board meeting that is “open to the public.” However, when we sent certified mail requiring they submit blueprints to us for approval, they did. We sent back a list of needed adjustments. It is a pretty long list to get their cheap house to be in keeping with the neighborhood. It also has lots of environmental design principals like a gravel driveway. Sounds good but it slopes so bad all the gravel will be at the bottom. Also just a one car driveway. The front has exposed granite instead of covering it with brick or hardiplank. It is also less than 30 feet off the street, which our covenant requires.

They are sending us a written response by tomorrow so we will see what happens. I expect them to build without our approval, daring us to take legal action. There are a few people on the street pretty interested in that legal fight as well as taking on the organization as a whole. The fact they are so against the desire of county taxpayers makes us want to challenge their future funding. Also, the organization is so poorly run we want to challenge their non-profit status. Their board is riddled with members directly benefiting from land trust financial transactions by both selling land to the trust and also receiving land trust homes. How could the board be expected to make impartial decisions when they own the land trust their very home?

I’ve enjoyed getting fired up over some local politics. Next, I need to figure out how to file an injunction to prevent them from building the house. At a minimum, the covenant requires it be 30 feet off the street so I don’t see how they could ignore that. The trick is that the lot dips down so fast that building it 30 feet off the street wouldn’t work well, which is why no private developer was interested. The legal battle will be tough because we have no association fee and limited funds, yet half their board are lawyers so they will incur no legal expenses and have a fat budget courtesy of my property taxes. It is messed up, but worth the fight. Anyone know how to file legal paperwork without a lawyer? I don’t even know what court to file in or what paperwork is required.

Vaccines & Boundaries

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:39:54 -0400

So Mitchell is now two months old. He just got his first round of vaccinations today and was pretty ticked about it. By the way, if you want to get me really fired up, tell me how you think vaccines cause autism and that you don’t believe in them. It doesn’t seem to matter what the CDC or any number of statistics say, there is still this crowd of people opposed to them like they are as “evil” as birth control, state funded lotteries and gay marriage. If those wackos had their way, we’d actually have kids walking around with polio (well, not for long actually) in a developed country in the 21st century. The only reason someone even has the option of not vaccinating is because everyone else did get it so they don’t have much to worry about, which ought to prove these things do less harm than good.

On a totally unrelated note, we sold our armoire, TV and surround sound. Used the money to buy a 42” LCD that I mounted over the fireplace. The house was wired for cable up there so I’ve been itching to get one since we got the place in December. Now with football season around the corner, I caved. It goes in the books as part of Deanna’s birthday present but could probably more accurately be called an early anniversary present for me. Deanna and I are having an ongoing discussion about how many Georgia games we’ll go to this year with Mitchell being so young. I’m guess just a few so we’ll tailgate with him, then come home to watch it on the new big screen. I made it about 24 hours before I broke down and called Charter to get HD for it, but the upgrade from basic cable without a box up to HD including the dual tuner DVR is only $19/month, not as bad as I thought.

Single people may not understand what happened next in a furniture rearrangement. Since the armoire was gone, we brought another chair and the piano in from my office. That left room for a bedroom set (we didn’t have a guest bed, people just used the sleeper sofa). So we got back the set we lent a friend when we first moved to Athens. The weird part was that before we even had it all setup, we were already apparently both wondering if Mitchell’s eight grandparents were going to start staying over now that we have a guest room. It led to a long discussion about boundaries and what is an appropriate amount of time to spend with family. Kind of inspired from a great book on the subject by Dr. Henry Cloud called Boundaries. My scientific side really wanted a set formula, like one night per month per grandparent or one every other month for couples that could be saved up but not redeemed more than four nights at a time with all reservations requiring at least three days notice. Sounds more like a cell phone minute plan. Of course, it’s unrealistic to have a formula like that. The trick is, how would you determine appropriate and inappropriate visit lengths and frequencies in advance? How do you balance things like this? If you have a formula, or just want to make up a joke one to compete with mine, I’ll be especially interested to hear about it.

Fatherhood

Fri, 3 Jul 2009 08:10:54 -0400

Tomorrow Mitchell will be a month old. Time for me to start talking like a dad and referring to how they grow up so fast. It seems like people are more opinionated on babies than anything else. Maybe it is because it seems like a safe thing to discuss so it is easier to share your thoughts. Also, anyone with a child feels like an expert on the matter and thus assumes those without children need huge amounts of advice. That isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the advice, just that I can’t really use conflicting advice from every single person I know and quite a few that I don’t. However, a few that have stuck with me are to remain flexible when your plan doesn’t work out and to cherish each moment, good or bad.

The flexibility idea first arose in pregnancy at our birthing classes. We were planning to use the Bradley Method for a natural delivery. The nurse leading our birthing class told us she had planned to do that as well but ended up having complications that prevented it. She wanted us to have our plan but be prepared in case it didn’t work out and to make sure we didn’t feel like failures if our plan didn’t happen. That turned out to be great advice. Deanna ended up being induced with all types of monitors hooked up to her instead of spending the first part of labor at home. This meant she could do the exercises and positions she had practiced and also that she got fatigued physically and emotionally more quickly. Her water took a long time to break but once it did, the inducing drug did its job and things moved quickly, so quickly that it got too intense and Deanna got an epidural. She ended up loving that, it let her relax and even sleep as she finished dilating and was still able to push when the time came. I don’t know how but she only had to push for 20 minutes. All that to say, it wasn’t what we planned, but all things considered, the delivery went well. I’m glad we weren’t dead set on one “right way.”

Mitchell had a few issues in the hospital, though I don’t know many babies who don’t. Everyone is hypersensitive, and rightfully so with such a fragile thing as a newborn baby. The first day we had to keep putting him under a heat lamp to warm him up. On the second day his blood sugar was low, probably due to some trouble latching on to feed. By the third day, the doctors were worried the blood sugar might indicate a more serious illness so they ran all kinds of test, turned out to be nothing. For a few hours they thought he might have to stay after we were discharged. That was when I realized how attached I’d become because it really freaked me out to think about leaving the hospital without him. We had the car seat with us and the whole house was ready for his arrival after months of preparation. It just would feel like a loss to not bring him with us. Fortunately that wasn’t necessary, the test were fine and we brought him home.

Now he has been home a month and things are finally settling into a new normal, which is why I have a few minutes to blog. I wouldn’t normally be blogging at 8AM on a Friday, but Mitchell, like most newborns, likes to wake up between 6:30 and 7:00 every morning. There isn’t much I can do to help during the night time feedings so I try to stay awake with him during this early morning time so Deanna can catch up on sleep.

I knew I would be tired with a baby but this is different than I thought. No more sleeping at night and being awake all day. Day and night have blurred and now it is just aking up every 2-3 hours non-stop for weeks on end. The plus side is that we are getting him into a predictable schedule. This has helped calm him down from major crying fits and it lets us sleep easier knowing when to expect him up. Like most of our friends, we are using the Baby Wise schedule that basically has him feed, stay awake a bit, then nap. The best part of that has been an explanation of the cries. I know we are supposed to learn the babies cries, but that wasn’t terribly intuitive initially and the book helped. In particular, it advocates that you let a child cry up to 20 minutes when first put down for a nap but that if there is crying during the nap you immediately get the child. He is getting better by the day at napping and that is freeing us up some during the day. The next step will be to remove a feeding or two from the eight per day and move towards him sleeping through the night in the next month.

As for Deanna and I, we’ll be excited to have a vacation sometime sooner than later. It is just tougher to find a few minutes to relax and talk than it used to be. There hasn’t really been a dull moment the last month, and if there was, I was asleep.

I just made the cutoff for my first Father’s Day. I haven’t had to do too much dad stuff yet though. I am mainly the diaper changer and the occasional bottle feeder. Breast feeding helps Deanna attach to Mitchell more than I can. It helps to hear that its normal not to feel real attached yet as a dad. In a few weeks, he should start smiling at us and that should help a lot. Right now I can mainly make him scream at me or not scream at me, not a good place for deep relationship building.

Deanna and I are becoming more stereotypical with our gender roles through this. With me teaching online and Deanna’s business jobs in the past, we’ve talked about me staying at home and looking after things. I like working at home but after this first month, I don’t think I would be able to get much work done with Mitchell around. Not that it matters, because Deanna really wants to stay home as much as she can now. So much in fact that our main disagreement has been about me trying to push her to get out more than she wants. Anyways, we’ve started looking into ways to have her stay home as much as she wants. I still like working from home and hopefully if she is here with Mitchell, I’ll be able to get some work done. Though for that to happen, I should quit blogging and get to work.

iPhone Kindle, Outliers, White Identity

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:33:18 -0400

So, I have been very intrigued and interested in the Kindle since Amazon released it a few years back. I love the idea of being able to wirelessly buy a book and have it in my hand in seconds. I also like the feel of a real book but I hate paying shipping, driving to a store, or waiting on the library so the accessibility of an ebook can at times trump the easier reading experience of a book. However, at $359, I’m not going to buy a Kindle anytime soon.

As most know, I also love my iPhone and find it a great convergence device where I just don’t need as many gadgets because it can do so many things. That said, there weren’t great reading options on it. Mainly just open source classics to read on the free Stanza app. So, when Amazon released the Kindle app for the iPhone I downloaded it. The app is free and you pay for books but the book costs are typically $9.99, not bad compared to book store prices. You can even go download the first chapter of most books as a free preview that is much better than the 30 second song preview on iTunes. I have about five book previews right now and it makes it a lot easier to decide what is worth reading.

If you have a Kindle, it will track which page you are on for both the phone and Kindle. But for me, I just love being able to pull out my phone and read a few pages when I get a second. For big time reading I’ll still use books but I’m the type who likes to be reading a book in each room of the house and this really streamlines it so I can read one book at a time easier.

Anyways, the first book I downloaded was Outliers. I finished it earlier this week after reading a few pages at a time over the last few weeks. I enjoyed its analytical approach combined with outside the box thinking like with Freakonomics. The basic premise is that people who are extraordinary performers (statistical outliers) such as Bill Gates and the Beatles rarely get their simply by their own merit. Instead, they are exceptional people but also in near ideal circumstances. So, it does not detract from there accomplishments as much as it puts into question the setup of our society that might never get to fully use lots of our exceptional talent because someone is born into a poor family, in the wrong month of year, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One example is that your birthday plays a huge role in your opportunity to be a professional athlete. If you are born just before the cutoff, you are the oldest person in your age group. Now it is by just a few months, but in the earlier years this can be a big difference. So, the older child is more mature and so is more likely to be recognized as talented. Then they are more likely to end up on the all-star teams with the better coaches, equipment, competition, and training. So, the initial advantage may have just been the birthday, but then throw in the extra opportunities, and by high school that child really is a much better athlete than the peer who did not make the birthday cutoff. The point is that with this setup we only tap into a small portion of our talent. Instead, we might have several leagues with multiple cutoff dates at young ages so that we don’t filter out talented people due to arbitrary things like birthdays.

Like a lot of Americans, I like the idea of a meritocracy. If I can view my accomplishments as solely attributable to me, then I don’t have to feel bad for advantages I had over others. However, as I examine educational issues in my doctoral work, I’ve come across plenty of issues where this simply isn’t true. One aspect in particular came early on when my first year professor helped me learn about white privilege. It challenges our common racial neutrality where I don’t have a racial identity or acknowledge how my whiteness may have been an advantage. It is easy to see how other races have had disadvantages, but basically by being white, I have avoided those disadvantages, which is in itself an advantage. That is a bit of a tongue twister and hard to write in a few words what I spent months processing.

The bottom line is that it makes me more compassionate towards underperforming children I see in schools with less than ideal situations. For example, it is disheartening to see students here in Clarke county struggle mightily to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) while children in next door Oconee county do great. Is it the fault of these children here that they were born into these situations? While they could certainly work hard and rise above it, it is by no means a level playing field. The children in Oconee are more likely to achieve great things when they work hard. They will deserve praise for their accomplishments, but I think it is important people in those situations recognize and be aware of the privileges and lack of disadvantages they have had compared to others.

Puerto Viejo, Limon

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 09:16:37 -0500

We spent the weekend in Puerto Viejo in the Limon province on the Caribbean coast. It is actually just 30 miles north of Panama. It took about four hours to get here even though it is only about 160 kilometers from San Jose. The roads out to Limon (a major port) were OK, but there was a lot of traffic and delays from the trucks coming in and out of Limon and also from construction delays fixing the roads from the rainy season. The roads were especially bad from Limon to Puerto Viejo, that last 40 kilometers took about an hour and a half because it was mainly gravel roads with potholes all over the place and lots of one lane bridges so you had to wait and yield.

The town is full of lots of surfers so most of the places to stay are cheap and small. Plenty of hostels, backpackers and people camping on the shore. The night life is pretty active and reminded us of Athens because it means the town is pretty slow to wake up too. Most people in the central valley are of Spanish decent, whereas the people here are similar to other countries along the Caribbean. I wouldn’t want to base a study abroad directly in Puerto Viejo because of all the distractions and opportunities for trouble, but off in the more residential areas there are some ideal sites. The area is also known for its chocolate and we got to meet a local farmer and vendor. She has a program where she shows people how she harvests, grinds and makes the chocolate and she also grows the various flavors to mix with the chocolate like mint, vanilla, coffee, cinnamon, and coconut. The only ingredients are chocolate, cane sugar, brown sugar, and any natural flavoring so it sticks together better and is also healthier.

Saturday we met with Susanna, our contact to try and organize a trip here. She has a degree in Biology from the University of Minnesota and then spent several years in the Peace Corps before settling down here. She works with an eco-tourism group called ATEC and also does a few other odd jobs. She showed us a women’s center that has dorms we could stay in and also some ecological projects we could be involved in. They are growing organic bananas, limes, and chocolate which they sell for profit. There is also a composting bin they use to capture methane gas that is then used for cooking. Along the river edge there, they have lots of coal deposits that the people there have also used for cooking. Susanna is helping them grow native trees to restore the canopy so they can have shade grown organic produce as a way to show how they can use the land for farming but still protect it. The site also has a library that could be used as a meeting place, to teach children, or even to train teachers on some basic science ideas.

Next, we saw three different schools in the area that are within walking distance of the dorms. The women’s center could also rent bikes to our students that would make everything even more accessible. The bridge leading to one school had washed out so it was a decent walk to it. These are smaller than the one we saw in Palmares, often with only two or three teachers. Some had little houses that the teachers can live in since most come in from Limon and it would be a long commute. Indigenous people make up a decent part of the population in these schools. Susanna has a contact that is the science director for all of the Limon province and knows some teachers at the schools but is not yet sure how we could best coordinate teaching in the schools.

The area has lots of ecological projects our students could be a part of when not teaching. There is a national park along the coast where we could help release sea turtles in May. A recycling center has recently been built, it is trying to increase capacity to become profitable or at least ween off its need of donations to operate. Susanna also does some work teaching the local people how to monitor the water quality and that is a project in need of more volunteers. There is a lot of potential here as a place to teach or just to have a long weekend to see a very different part of the country and be involved with the local ecology projects here.