When I was in elementary school, I was en route to a civil engineering career. I was the kid who spent rainy days digging little canal systems through the playground with sticks to drain the puddles underneath the swingsets and at the bottoms of the slides. (You'd think the other kids would thank me for this valuable service, but, alas, elementary school doesn't work that way.)

I'm always reminded of that on days like today, when we're getting hurricane-boosted steady rains after 2 months of dryness. I get to go around and check the perimeter - make sure all the downspouts are functioning and the rainbarrel overflows are connected, dig out the spots where the driveway swale has silted up, and watch as puddles drain away into the wildflower garden. (Someday I'll get to digging real french drains around the house and a rain garden in the low spot out back, but it always seems low priority in dry weather - and I'd have to find a new excuse for playing in the rain!)

In reworking ArborWiki's page on the Ann Arbor Greenbelt, I came across an item from Concentrate that noted,

When Ann Arbor initially proposed its Greenbelt Program, local developers worried that it would create competition, scarcity and drive up the cost of building sprawl in Washtenaw County. Now developers are starting to sell land to the Greenbelt.

The Ann Arbor City Council approved spending $626,000 in city money to buy 139 acres of rural land in Superior Township from Biltmore, a residential development company. ... The land is in two parcels along either side of Prospect Road near Vreeland Road.

Two summers ago, Cara's dad replaced the ceiling fan in our living room with a shinier, beefier one. The original ceiling fan hadn't been particularly well hung - it was installed with a plastic circuit box that was wired (meaning, as a support mechanism) with copper wire to a pipe running above the ceiling. Lovely. So he got a ceiling fan support kit, with an expandable support bar that jams in between joists so that you can stably hang a fan from it.

As our tv room rock band room's ceiling fan was looking similarly questionable in its structural integrity, I decided it needed to be rehung. Went out and got a support bar and everything.

How the World Works' post Triumph of the City Dweller points to a new mapping tool from the the Center for Neighborhood Technology showing relative residents' gas costs within metropolitan areas, both absolutely, and as a share of the regional median household income, for 2000 and 2008. The outcome? Downtowns win!

Now, yes, as Andrew Leonard points out, "Flash forward to 2008: The entire map is SCREAMING RED" ... with the few outliers of low household gas spending speckling downtown. it emphasizes things are rough for almost everyone - but that would seem to show a compelling need to address people's inability to go about their life without spending a crazy amount on gas.

While up north, Michael and I spent a significant amount of time discussing peak oil, global warming, and related issues. Michael asked me, as someone professionally interested in The Shape Of Things To Come, what I thought our societal future held.

Hedging my bets by placing predictions far enough out that no one alive today could call me on them, I stated a prediction that, 100 years from now, our land use, transportation, and agricultural patterns would strongly resemble those of 100 years ago, but that we would maintain something like our current level of communications infrastructure. "So, steampunk, then?" stated Michael and Margaret simultaneously.

JP requests, I provide. (Don't abuse it.)

Apologizing for posting a meme is the new posting a meme, so I'm not going to apologize. I like this one.

The instructions are to pick seven songs you're really into at the moment (variations on the meme include focusing on songs that remind you of summer) and write a little blurb about why you like each.

(some songs...)

You're it.

I tend to obsess on a single album at a time, so picking seven songs with any variety is difficult. But here's what I got, heavily influenced by KEXP's online feed, for which I blame Elias. Links to YouTube, since such is life that the easiest way to link to a song is to link a music video, either official or fan-produced.

This weekend, we took a quick jaunt to the UP; the motivating factor was that the newly-Dr. Cohn is about to leave town for a post-doc, and had never been across the bridge in his 6 years in Michigan. (We then found out that Miss Margaret was also a blushing virgin of a troll, despite a Michigan childhood, and made her come along too.)

Some scattered thoughts on the trip:

Some of you may recall our complaining about "mouse smell" a few months back, originating from the basement. Mmm, sweet smell of death.

In fact, I disassembled nearly our entire heating system and rearranged the entire basement in the process of trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. No luck. (I was positive it was in a heat duct, since the smell was not there when I woke up that day, but the heat turned on while I was taking a shower, and something started to bake.) It subsided after a week, during much of which we were not-here, but there's been a bit of a lingering aroma.

Fast forward to now. I've got contractors installing a flue liner for our chimney, so that we stop getting condensation through the brick into our walls. Taking apart the furnace and water heater flue leads, the contractor called, "Hey, come here - you're lucky you didn't croak, man."

For those who have a touch of both hypochondria and arachnophobia, the internet is DEFINITELY NOT a good tool for answering the question, "What kind of spider did I just find (and adrenally smoosh) in my basement?"

Fortunately, I have enough self-control to venture only as far as Extension articles, and avoid both google images and wikipedia.

That is all.

Having missed last week's opening day of the Downtown Ypsilanti Farmers' Market, I pushed my lunch back to two today, when the market opens, to see what they had. I was therefore ravenous on getting there, but someone from an office in the Key Bank Building was circulating with leftover sandwiches from a meeting! Thus fortified, I was able to go about my shopping.