Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Ok. One more recommendation.

This is the coolest Portland website ever. A happy hour directory that tells you where you can find happy hours at any given moment in your town. It even has a little bar to show you how far away from a happy hour you are at your current time. They also have a branch for Seattle, and one for Columbus (and Dublin), Ohio.

Thirst no more!
Urban Drinks

Product endorsement.

Oh, the ubiquitous product endorsement. We all have things that we use and we love and we wish everyone would use and love. I love my Burt's Bees soap... I love my Marmot Raincoat... but here's something I ran across the other day that I thought I would share with the internet. I think this is such a great idea that I can't help being a corny "brand-cheerleader" for a few minutes.

Sorry things have been sparse around here lately--life has been busy. I will hopefully have more to give you this weekend!

I wanted to share this with you in hope that you'll consider it for the day when your Chacos bite the dust.

I just sent my sandals in to have them re-soled. It cost me about $40 (plus $5 or so to mail them), and they came back refurbished and lovely. It was way cheaper than buying a new pair, and kept a portion of my shoes out of someone's trash bin. Yay sustainability! :)

When I got them back (yesterday), there was a little pamphlet in the box with them, and it highlighted a program that they are offering for recycling Chacos when it's time to finally retire a pair. If you take your shoes to one of the local businesses that is participating, Chaco will take them back, fix them up, and then send them off on the wings of non-profits to provide shoes to people in need all around the world. Some of the areas they work with are in Africa and Nepal. It makes me very happy to know that when I'm through with my sandals (still hopefully a few years from now!) someone else can use them, and they won't just get thrown away. Oh yeah, and you'll get 20% of a new pair of Chacos from those retailers you return them too, as well! Unfortunately for all you REI-heads, they're not playing yet, but, there are lots of places in Oregon, and one place in Kirkland, WA that will take them back. They have a web-retailer that's participating, too.

Anyhow, here are the pertinent links. I hope you consider doing this--it's not much of a hassle, gives you an awesome price break, and you get to do something good for someone else! I think stuff like this is so great, and so cool. Yay, Chaco!

Info about the program, and a list of participating retailers: http://www.chacousa.com/inside/recycleprogram.cfm?curloc=inside_chaco&subcat=recycle
One of the foundations they work with: http://www.dzifoundation.org/ (also partnered with Marmot!)

That's my enthusiastic product/program recommendation of the moment. :)

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

4:50 pm - 102 degrees

Well. The time has come. The insanity of the day has overtaken me and I need to experience this heat for myself. What does 102 degrees feel like?

The streets are empty of cars and humans. Wish me luck as I venture out into the asphalt inferno.

And cross your fingers that the bus driver has insisted that people keep the windows closed and that the AC is working well. Otherwise I'm in for a long trip home.

Just saw another ambulance fly by. I knew we wouldn't all make it out of this in one piece.

Signing off for today.

Tomorrow? If it's still hot, you'd better believe the news will still be covering it.

Good luck to you all.

3:29 pm - 102 degrees

Inside pane of glass is now warm to the touch.

Reports are in from South downtown that a window box of geraniums has burst into flames.

Visible pedestrians all seem dazed and confused. Many ignore crosswalks, some walk down middle of streetcar tracks.

Emergency vehicles too exhausted to sound sirens.

Giant tow truck traveling down Harrison St.

Traffic on 4th virtually non-existent.

OHSU tram bravely continues to run on schedule.

2:48 pm - Holding at 100 degrees

I'm not sure what part of Portland they are living in, but KPTV is reporting that currently is is "partly cloudy" in Portland. We WISH.

Other amusing things from local stations:

KATU offers their forecast for the next three days...
Today: 102 - RECORD HEAT
Tomorrow: 100 - HOT
Thursday: 94 - STILL HOT

As of 2:25 it was "Sunny and 100 degrees."

2:05 pm - 100 DEGREES!

Well, we've done it. As of 1:45 today, we've hit the 100 degree mark.

All of the links in my Hotmail inbox just turned red. Is it a coincidence? More like a sign. The hot temperatures are burning the internet.

It went away though after I clicked on one of the links. Maybe not a very good coincidence after all.

12:33 pm - 92 degrees

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! WE HAVE AN AMBULANCE!

Now things are starting to heat up. The reading of 92 degrees was as of 12:00 noon. What a spanking rise in temp! Here we go. 90 degrees before noon.

The signs of disaster begin to kick in. Not only do we have an ambulance, but it was followed by a firetruck. Uh-oh.

There are more people on the street now as the lunch hour continues.

Construction workers are moving wheelbarrows of something in the empty lot across the way. Did no one tell them they were supposed to do their work between 4 and 7 am?

The sky appears hazier than it did earlier today. Perhaps the air is beginning to burn? That would explain the firetruck.

12:17 pm - 89 degrees

Windows are still cool to the touch. This could be due to double-paned glass.

Weather.com has updated to show that it was 89 degrees at 11:45. Based on their "every-half-hour or so" updates, we should be receiving new information in the next 20 minutes or so. Unfortunately, this live-blogger will not be able to inform you if it struck 90 by noon.

Extrapolating from the rise in temperature over the last few updates, I would guess that it's likely. Especially as we're now entering the DANGER ZONE portion of the day when things tend to rocket up and really bake.

The American flag across the way is still billowing in the breeze. Completely unfurled and stretched out. A steady wind appears to be blowing continuously. The streets remain empty, though I can see lines forming at the food carts up the street.

No ambulances yet.

The trees still appear to be greenish, except for the ones with dark purple leaves.

11:50 am - 87 degrees

How deceptive. The Weather.com temperature reading was from 11:25 am. HALF AN HOUR AGO! We may reach 90 degrees before noon.

Today's record was 98. Think we'll beat it?
Only 11 more degrees to go.

Most of the ice has now melted in my iced coffee.

I just saw a crow fly over. Evidently it's not too hot for crows.

The wisps of cloud in the sky are now gone. Foot traffic appears to have slowed despite the fact that the lunch hour is rapidly approaching.

Still no ambulances. Have they melted??

Here are a few recommendations from KGW.com. They are quoting the Red Cross and "ER doctors" on tips for preventing heat stroke. These select few are my favorites. They also advised "AVOID ALCOHOL" three or four times in different places. Do I detect a hidden agenda?

--Eat small meals and eat more often. Avoid foods that are high in protein which increase metabolic heat.

--Avoid using salt tablets unless directed to do so by a physician.

--Slow down. Avoid strenuous activity. If you must do strenuous activity, do it during the coolest part of the day, which is usually in the morning between 4 and 7 a.m.

-- If you're thirsty, you've waited too long.

9:45 am - 80 degrees

That's right. 80 degrees before 10am. It's warmer outside than it is in my air conditioned office building. The weather.com reading is a little out-dated. I wonder how hot it is not? Predictions says it's supposed to be 102 today.

The trees outside are still looking green. They have not yet experienced any heat-related wilting.

Cars still travel down 4th Avenue with their usual aplomb.

Pedestrians are traveling down the sidewalks. Most are wearing short-sleeves. Women can be seen wearing tank-tops and skirts.

There are small wisps of cloud in the sky.

No buildings have collapsed and road work continues as usual. No ambulances yet today.

Ridiculo ad absurdum

Ok. The local news lately has been in a frenzy.

There are SEVERE WEATHER WARNINGS for Portland, OR regarding the MASSIVE HEAT WAVE that is in the process of striking us all immobile and potentially dead.

For over a week now the forecasters have been predicting doom, gloom, and dire circumstances for the middle of this week. Warning us to prepare. Hold our babies close, protect the feeble and innocent, there is VERY HOT WEATHER on the way.

Of course, for some people, hot weather is a severe event. If you are very old or sick or poor or feeble, it can be a traumatic, potentially life-threatening weather situation. If you're not, it's just really hot.

Anyhow, in the spirit of community, and truly engaging with my local news and local events, I have decided to keep you up-to-date on the details of this crisis. We shall call this LIVE BLOGGING THE HEAT WAVE.

Tune in for updates as the event unfolds.

Here is the severe weather warning issued by the National Weather Service for today:

AN EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 11 PM PDT WEDNESDAY.

A STRONG RIDGE OF HIGH PRESSURE IN COMBINATION WITH OFFSHORE EAST WINDS IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE VERY HOT WEATHER OVER INTERIOR NORTHWEST OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON. STRONG OFFSHORE FLOW TUESDAY WILL DRIVE TEMPERATURES TO NEAR OR SLIGHTLY ABOVE 100 DEGREES OVER THE LOWER ELEVATIONS WITH WITH 80S TO LOWER 90S OVER THE HIGHER CASCADES. THE OFFSHORE FLOW WILL KEEP TEMPERATURES VERY WARM FOR OUR AREA OVERNIGHT TUESDAY. TEMPERATURES WILL FALL ONLY INTO THE UPPER 50S AND 60S JUST FOR A SHORT TIME AROUND SUNRISE ON WEDNESDAY.

WEDNESDAY WILL BE ANOTHER VERY HOT DAY. TEMPERATURES MAY COOL A FEW DEGREES FROM TUESDAY BUT WILL STILL REACH THE UPPER 90S TO AROUND 100 DEGREES IN THE LOWER ELEVATIONS ON WEDNESDAY WITH MID 80S TO MID 90S IN THE HIGHER CASCADES.

AN EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING MEANS THAT A PROLONGED PERIOD OF DANGEROUSLY HOT TEMPERATURES WILL OCCUR. THE HOT TEMPERATURES WILL CREATE A DANGEROUS SITUATION IN WHICH HEAT ILLNESSES ARE LIKELY. DRINK PLENTY OF FLUIDS...STAY IN AN AIR-CONDITIONED ROOM...STAY OUT OF THE SUN... AND CHECK UP ON RELATIVES AND NEIGHBORS.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

"The Nina Totin' Bag"

Should I be ashamed of NPR? Talk about blatant self-referential opportunism! Holy cow! That's awful! Then again, it's kind of funny, too. I don't even know what to think....???

Named for NPR’s Legal Affairs Correspondent, Nina Totenberg... it has a Warhol-esque image of the lady on the front.

The Nina Totin' Bag

Just what you need for a day at the beach.

What’s wrong with the tap??


Honestly. Maybe we should consider finding a new chic name for good ole tap water. “Home Fresh” maybe… “Hey hon, can you snag me a glass of home fresh on your way out of the kitchen?” That sounds like a slangy nickname for your pal… “Hey home fresh! What’s jiggin’?”

Anyhow. I want to share with you some excerpts from an amazing article on the devil with angel wings that is bottled water. After reading this article I affirm my resolution to keep lugging my Nalgene around with me wherever I go, and filling it at water fountains instead of buying a bottle of water. I’m definitely guilty of picking up a bottle at a gas station when I want something cold, but this article reaffirms to me what a silly (not to mention negatively impactful) choice that is.

I’ve sifted out a few interesting lines that I think are pretty powerful, but I encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s interesting and well-written. About as eye-opening as that fascinating article on the banana industry I shared a while back.

Here’s a link to the article (source: Fastcompany.com via Boingboing.net): "Message in a Bottle" by Nigel Cox

And here are a few choice facts about bottled water. Click on the above link for reference.

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.

  • In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.

  • Today, for all the apparent variety on the shelf, bottled water is dominated in the United States and worldwide by four huge companies. Pepsi (NYSE:PEP) has the nation's number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina, with 13% of the market. Coke's (NYSE:KO) Dasani is number two, with 11% of the market. Both are simply purified municipal water--so 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our convenience.

  • …within a decade, our consumption of bottled water is expected to surpass soda.

  • San Pellegrino's 1-liter glass bottles--so much a part of the mystique of the water itself--weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh, dramatically adding to freight costs and energy consumption. The bottles are washed and rinsed, with mineral water, before being filled with sparkling Pellegrino--it uses up 2 liters of water to prepare the bottle for the liter we buy. The bubbles in San Pellegrino come naturally from the ground, as the label says, but not at the San Pellegrino source. Pellegrino chooses its CO2Tuscany, then trucked north and bubbled into Pellegrino.

    carefully--it is extracted from supercarbonated volcanic springwaters in
  • Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer :"We're completely thoughtless about handing out $1 for this bottle of water, when there are virtually identical alternatives for free. It's a level of affluence that we just take for granted. What could you do? Put that dollar in a jar on the counter instead, carry a water bottle, and at the end of the month, send all the money to Oxfam or CARE and help someone who has real needs. And you're no worse off."

  • Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water; 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water.

Than again, regarding Fiji water—the flip side….

  • The plant employs 200 islanders--set to increase to 250 this year--most with just a sixth- or eighth-grade education. Even the entry-level jobs pay twice the informal minimum wage. But these are more than simply jobs--they are jobs in a modern factory, in a place where there aren't jobs of any sort beyond the villages. And the jobs are just part of an ecosystem emerging around the plant--water-based trickle-down economics, as it were.

  • Of course, the irony of shipping a precious product from a country without reliable water service is hard to avoid. This spring, typhoid from contaminated drinking water swept one of Fiji's islands, sickening dozens of villagers and killing at least one. Fiji Water often quietly supplies emergency drinking water in such cases. The reality is, if Fiji Water weren't tapping its aquifer, the underground water would slide into the Pacific Ocean, somewhere just off the coast. But the corresponding reality is, someone else--the Fijian government, an NGO--could be tapping that supply and sending it through a pipe to villagers who need it. Fiji Water has, in fact, done just that, to some degree--20 water projects in the five nearby villages. Indeed, Roll has reinvested every dollar of profit since 2004 back into the business and the island.
So, essentially what does it all boil down to? If we’re going to drink bottled water, should we make sure that it’s coming from a far-away place (like Fiji) so that we support small economies? Or do all the transport costs and ecological damage done in getting it here cancel out the good it does for those people to buy it?

It somehow still feels wasteful to drink bottled water when I have a perfectly good tap at home and at work. Then again, at least it’s better than soda, eh?

Monday, July 2, 2007

There will come soft rains.


















This is a lovely, haunting, humbling article from New Scientist magazine (link via kottke.org).

How long would it take the Earth to recover if humankind was to irrevocably, inexplicably vanish?

Imagine Earth Without People

A really amazing read as I spend my day traipsing around in the city.

On some deep down instinctual level I find that part of me longs for this to happen. Then, when i think about it more, I realize that I would want to be the omniscient eye that's watching it all occur, safe and sound, with my loved ones by my side, of course.

Obviously, this must follow.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

- Sara Teasdale

In other eerie news....

On the way back from our hike yesterday on the Banks-Vernonia Trail, C. and I had a white-knuckle driving experience. We were right about here. Ten miles south of Vernonia. A person in a Red Minivan comes flying up behind us, tailgates us for a mile or so, and then passes us in a no-passing zone with a corner just ahead. Of course, around the corner comes another car. The minivan managed to get back into our lane in time and aside from a one-finger salute from the oncoming car and a stout blast from the horn on C’s end, came to no harm. When we reached the intersection with Hwy 26 a few minutes later, they were there, waiting to turn. I’m so glad they passed us and really got ahead.

Later that night, I was browsing the local news site, looking for the weather or something, and what do I find? This story.

Quite literally just where we were earlier the same day. Under the same circumstances that we found ourselves in. I guess we were the lucky ones.

How dangerous, how foolish. All for a few more seconds. People need to stop being in such a darn hurry all the time.

Today's soapbox is decidedly... GREEN!

While I was fussing and cleaning and cooking dinner on Friday night (laying low after a gnarly encounter with some less than perfect Thai food… blah), I was listening to the City Club of Portland on OPB. I would say that 7 times out of 10, I find that program rather dry, and it serves as moderately interesting entertainment when I’m in my car driving somewhere. This past Friday’s topic however, was the future of transportation in our area.

It was neat to listen to the ideas and the concepts that people were throwing back and forth—Cars without drivers on our highways! Sustainable neighborhoods! Truck routes that bypass the city entirely! I felt like I was looking down the maw of a Jetson’s era space-age in which we climb into our cars, type our destination into our GPS-style mapper, crack open a good book, and, Voila!, are transported to our desired location a few minutes later. One of the guests speaking on the show (I missed the portion of the program in which they were introduced) noted that for the last couple of centuries, we’ve experienced a major transportation revolution once ever 50 years. The Car. The Train. The Airplane. Based on this theory, we’re overdue for some sort of major, society-shaping change. Interesting.

The thing that interested me most about the program was a description of a pervasive attitude that many developers and Americans have regarding agricultural land and farm land. This wasn’t something that those being interviewed claimed as their own, but rather something that they discussed.

What is an open field if not a future suburban development? “Empty space” where we find farms and forests is just an up-tapped cash-cow awaiting malls, box stores, parking lots and houses—in short: progress!!

Of course this perspective won’t be anything overt, nor will it be something that I imagine people go about shouting from the hilltops. Driving into Hillsboro and Beaverton from Forest Grove this weekend hammered this impression home to me, however. As we left Orenco Station and close in on the Streets of Tanasbourne, I noticed two or three small, single-family homes. They had yards, garages, driveways, the usual. Yet on either side of these homes leered giant new development. Townhouses, condos, strip malls, parking lots. I felt so sorry for the older couple out watering their lawn in the midst of all this progress.

I think as a society, we’ve forgotten the value of agriculture. Even in our “global society” on a local-level many communities are funded by industries such as farms, ranches, wineries, etc. Those “empty” fields are arteries for families, communities, and who micro-economies. What happens if that goes away? Can you grow wine grapes on the roof of your local Target?

Now, I’m not the more informed individual on this topic. Until I did a Google search of the US Government website, I thought that more than just 3% of Americans were employed in Agricultural labor. It doesn’t change my opinion that it’s important. I think that it’s something worth preserving if we can. Then again, there are a lot of battles out there and a lot of things worth preserving. But we can do our part. Please support legislation that enforces the Portland-area urban growth boundaries! Encourage affordable high-density living in the Portland area. Discourage sprawl! A sprawling cat is cute. Sprawling metro? Not so cute.

Ride your bike! Compost! Buy wind energy! Re-use Ziplocs!