worth stopping by

Yes, I've been completely absent here on this blog, I know. To many things to do to make the time to post random thoughts. I have been thinking of taking it up again, if only to plug some of my recent projects. We'll see. (The lameness of the Blogger interface is a big problem that often keeps me away.)

I did however want to stop by and let you all know about a wonderful piece of music that I'd like you to take a listen to. I found it on the UTNE reader special "Indy Culture" issue (that includes a CD), and just can't get enough of it (possibly to the dismay of my honey!) Please take a minute to download and listen to (and watch if you like) the song "Bell", from Stephan Smith's website http://www.stephansmith.com.

As for a quick update on life as the random turtle knows it...

Life is good. David and I are doing smashingly well. We're settled into our spacious apartment, and have now successfully hosted two overnight guests (my mom and David's train loving friend from Colorado). MassBike is still on my list of places to go a few times a week (though quitting was about this close *holds thumb and forefinger up about a milimeter apart*), and Work there is getting accomplished once again after a 5 month hiatus. The other projects are al in various stages of in/completeness. Not much artwork getting done, but plans for more are always in the works. (A Political Art Therapy workshop/salon is one of the many things I'd like to do in the near future, and would only require a bit of time, some mainstream news magazines, and a bunch of folding chairs.)

The wedding (the official, legal, public one) is scheduled for next Solstice (June 20th), and will hopefully be at Portland Headlight in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. That is if no one else gets the reservation before we do, it's apparently a little competitive. I've discovered that our wedding will be "green". I just thoughtI was plannng a good, healthy, responsible wedding, but apparently there is a name for it! The goal is to have everyone take public transportation, or human powered transportation there, to have organic, vegan food, and to have it in a natural area (in the woods on a beach). SCUL is planning a mission to the wedding from Somerville, and David and I will be leaving on our bikes/trikes and heading off to Nove Scotia (on a boat). Oh, and there will be acoustic, midieval music to keep everyone jolly. I can't wait...

hiatus

Moving sucks. Remind me to never again take a whole month to move. Also, avoid working for an employer that doesn't have an office for 4 months. Especially when you are also moving.

Oh, and Bill Nye is my hero.

See you in a week. I'll be stuck at the hubby's family's vacation place on the Cape. (At least until I go crazy not being able to do any of the billion things that I need to do, and come home for a few days...)

What took them so long?

Yes, the rest of the US seems to be finally catching up to what the rest of the universe knew all along - the attack on Iraq was a sham. This country has always been a little slow...

On another snow job that is going on right now in Washington DC that you may not have heard about (though it actually made it onto the cover page of the Boston Globe last Satruday) is the US House Appropriations Committee (actually a subcommittee) randomly decided to pull all Transportations Enhancements (TEA) funding and stick it back into the general highway funding. This TEA program is what is responsible for Amatrak, highway safety programs, streetscaping revitalization, and rail-trails, among other non-motor-vehicle transportation pleasantries. Yes, this stuff is kind of non-essential in a budget conscious time, but the guy (Rep. Istook of Oklahoma!) who pushed for elimination turned around and added several billion dollars extra for highway projects. Oddly enough, King George's administration didn't even want this (they actually like rail-trails, apparently), so no one really know where it all came from. Fortunately, according to inside sources (I have inside sources! Isn't that cool?) the subcommitte's recommendation is likely to get reversed in the full committee. The nice thing is that there is a lot of press coverage of the issue, and it's all in favor of alternate transportation. Maybe bicycling is gettng just a bit more attention (and respect) right now because of that silly race in France?

Let's see, as for the other work related stuff, I've been pretty lackluster in the productivity department. The police curriculum is out the door, though by no means done. The pilot testing starts in a week or two. Sometime soon, I plan to get the curriculum up online for the general public to check out. That could be a painful process, though, since the guys who originally put it together decided to create it in Micros**t Powerpoint. But the curriculum turned out pretty good, I think. Not fantastic, but I think it's a good start. There are a few good pictures of my honey that made it into the presentation, too, which is just cute.

David and I have been doing a lot of recreating lately. We've been using his car a lot, and getting a little tired of it. It will be nice when he sells it, and we don't have to keep worrying about it getting tickets or being towed...

Also, we think we found a place to live. We thought we had one all set a couple of weeks ago, but the landlord backed out on us (ostensibly for a family emergency). This time we think it is a go. The place is not too big, but not too small. And it's on the top floor, so it will get lots of light hopefully. I'm working on getting a solar panel installed on the roof to power a few fun electrical goodies (powerbook, radio, tv maybe?). David knows all about electrical stuff and alternative energy too. Yay! The landlord is wonderfully eccentric, and will probably let us do all sorts of funky stuff to the place. (We had to turn down several nice, cheap places because they were way too prim and proper, and we knew that the owners would have been appalled at the decor that we want...

A housewarming party is in the works, and you'll all be invited of course!

Other random tidbits: David and I visited New York City with a friend of his last week and we saw a taping of the Daily Show (news parody show extrordinaire), which was fun, though somewhat anticlimactic. We also went to a renaissance fair at a castle in Gloucester (MA). I'd never been to one, and was glad I got to see what all the fuss was about. It was entertaining, and gave me lots of ideas for our "public" wedding that will probably be next Summer Solstice (to keep the number of anniversaries we have down to a minimum). I'm just trying to figure out how the midieval theme will work with the bicycle theme...

Oh, one last note, you'll all be happy to hear that David and I have pretty much given up on tv. And I don't miss it in the least.

tradition

There is something to be said for honest-to-goodness tradition. Many, many years ago (like, a thousand), the rulers of the world tended to take much less interest in the private affiars of the little people. For example, you could, for the most part, ingest any particular substance that you could stuff in your face. Another example: marriages were official if a couple (or their families) said they were official. Nowadays, the "people in charge" seem to think that it's very important that certain things are allowed and certain other things are not. And, certain things must be done a certain way.

Well, as you can imagine, David and I couldn't possibly have any of that rediculous mamby-pambyness or pandering to the authorities, so we got married without anyone else's consent, or even in the presence of any other human beings. Just some sand, some ocean, some rain, some birds, and the two of us. We said some stuff to eachother, tied some ribbons around our clasped hands in a handfasting ceremony, and basically just basked in the glow of the idea of having found the person who we wanted to be with for the rest of our lives. So, now we are betrothed. Not because some judge gave us a peice of paper, but because we say so. And that's really what it's all about, isn't it?

Oh, and we did this on the Summer Solstice. Hopefully, Mother Earth will bless us.

Other stuff is going on (the development of the Police Ed curriculum is coming to a head and pretty much consiming all my energies, the roommates are being the usual insane bunch that they've been, and the housing search hasn't really even begun...) but, really, nothing else seems to be all that important anymore when you suddenly realize that you are a part of a larger thing, and you are no longer alone in anything you do. It's such a powerful thing to have found someone who understands you so perfectly (yet not quite enough to make life boring!) and STILL wants to spend their lives by your side. I only hope that everyone reading this ends up as happy as we are.

Somerville's finest

I just called up the Somerville (MA) police department to ask them if their ticket book included a way to ticket bicyclists (for riding on the sidewalk, specifically). All I needed to know was if the standard ticket book had a blank space to to write in any municipal violation number. The woman who answered the phone said that she had no idea and that no one else there could find out right now (and to call back tomorrow). This seemed odd, because you would think that a police department would have some sort of access to their own ticket books.

I haven't had a good bicycle story to bitch about in a while so I'll tell you what happened to David and myself yesterday on a trip out to the middle of nowhere Massachusetts. (We had to pick up a pile of his stuff from his previous home, and we were in a CAR!) While coming back into civilization on route 117, I think, we got behind a bicyclist. The road was a very narrow, one-lane-in-each-direction rural road with a very respectable speed limit of something like 30 mph. There was a ton of oncoming traffic and the road was windier than a tangled Slinky toy. So we were driving patiently behind the cyclist. After a whole 30 seconds, the moron motorist behind us laid on his horn. David ignored him. The guy laid on the horn again, and managed to get a few other morons behind him to join him in the choir, too. David again ignored him. Eventually, David did squeeze by the biker, when there was a bit more lane width to work with. And about two minutes later we all caught up to the traffic that had been ahead of us at a red light (is this the punchline to every stupid motorist trick?). The grumpy moron passed us on the right and sped ahead. Yay for him. He was lucky I wasn't driving. I told David that he was far too patient, as I would have slammed on the brakes and actually gotten out of the car to present the moron with the asshole of the year award...

Speaking of David (as you may have guessed, he's the man. That man, I mean.) we are now looking for a nice two bedroom (or a large one bedroom) in Somerville. If ya know of anything...

Coming down to earth for a visit

Talk about life being a blur. I was in Portland, Oregon for the Bicycle Leadership Conference last week. I had two, count 'em, two presentations. Both were low key, and I don't think I offended or completely bored anyone during them, so I'm taking that as a success. The conference was on the whole, ok. And I learned a thing or two, but the most useful aspect of the trip, advocacywise, was getting to experience the "bicycling nirvana" that Portland has been dubbed. I was a little shocked at some of the stuff I saw there - for all the nirvana, there were very few cyclists on the roads at all. Nothing like what I'm used to in the Boston area. Odly enough, I saw more cyclists NOT on the road than on the road - they seemed to flock to the public transportation "light rail" trains, and also seemed more intersted in using the sidewalks to get their bikes from one place to another. The few local cyclists I spoke with expressed doubt at the safety of the streets. And looking at the bizarre and incredibly prevalent substandard bike lanes that speckled the roads I'm not too surprised. (They seemed to have caught Cambridgitis, and had tons of 4 foot bike lanes scrunched up next to extremely narrow parking lanes and shared travel lanes, squeezing lots of vehicles into a very small space.) However, despite all the evidence against the nirvana notion, riding a bike was, in fact, absolutely wonderful compared to Boston. The key was the ability of motorists (and pedestrians) to actually OBEY THE LAW! People actually stopped at stop lights! People actually moved into another lane before passing me at a reasonable speed and distance! No one honked or yelled! Traffic honestly stopped BEFORE the crosswalks at intersections (I witnessed two motorists actually BACK UP when they accidentally stopped a bit into the crosswalk)! No one was in a hurry! People were nice!

I was thinking that Boston drivers should have a little exchance program with Oregon. We can send a few of our road ragers out for a little TLC and/or toughlove and straighten them out. What is it about Eastern Massachusetts that births such insanity on the streets? It can't be the cold, because Texas and Florida are just as bad, from what I've heard. And we've got one of the most extensive public transportation systems anywhere in the Americas (though Bogota, Columbia puts us to shame), so it's not like people don't have a choice. It is the fact that we're so frustrated at the rest of the country for being so insane that we just can't contain our anger any longer? (Nope, see Texas and Florida again.)

Anyway, the Portland trip was interesting and I mostly enjoyed myself. You can check out just a few of the photos I took out there by clicking here. They're pretty random, so if you're looking at them and think to yourself "what the heck was on her mind when she took this one", it's perfectly understandable. The transportation geek's mind works in mysterious ways. One note that I'll point out is that the pictures of the street art are some very poor documentation of some street reclaiming efforts a la David Engwicht's book of that same name (mentioned previously in my blog). I'm going to be getting more involved in this type of community building in the future I hope, and I even got a nice, supportive e-mail from the man himself the other day. You can also see more pictures and info about the street I saw in Portland at City Repair, the group who organized the street reclaiming.

Finally, before I hit the submit button and get back to the real work, I have to update everyone on my newfound lovelife. It's good, really really good. Like about as good as it can get. Like I'm really in need of finding a better term for "lifemate". Rich Mackin suggested sweetheart, and I liked it at first, but have decided that it's still not quite right. But it's better than most of the alternatives, e.g. husband, partner, lover, mate, boyfriend...

my mom thinks it's fate

I just think it was pretty good timing, and a lot of persistance.

Yes, folks, I found a man. And not the one I thought I was looking for. But it turns out that he's the guy I SHOULD have been looking for. Thankfully, he's much more observant than I :-)

To top it off, dear readers, you may be happy to hear that this here blog was one of the main contributing factors to said kind and generous gentleman's interest in one Turtle.

More info will, I'm quite sure, trickle into future updates, but for now, all I have to say is life is not only looking up these days, but it is looking at the stars, and the clouds, and the birds, and all that really up stuff. Now we just need to find a spot of sea to dock a houseboat alongside some land where we can plant a garden...