Archive for March, 2009

I was going to let this one pass, since I try to be positive all the time, like a proper lifestyle writer. But now both Fortworthology and Cowtown Chronicles have picked up the story of the new, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, as certified by Green Building Council) type of home and whether this presents an appropriate direction for sustainable design.

In case you’re not sure what this all means, a good description of what LEED certification is about is included on The Eclectic Blog . The question raised is whether the LEED home is 1) ugly and 2) a reasonable standard. A long essay on the topic was posted in The American Prospect which, among many other highly salient points, taps much of modern architecture as a “mind boggling waste.”

From my brief research, it appears that nowhere on the LEED guidelines does it say that the new green home must look like something out of n Isaac Asimov novel. So why, then, so we see images of green houses that look like inside-out school restrooms?

Well — and this is just my opinion — perhaps some who favor environmentalist design also are antagonistic to traditional values and house structures, and want it to be obvious to everyone that THIS is a GREEN HOME, $@%^&^$(#!

It’s the zealots vs. the rest of us, people.  Long sigh.

For a more authoritative reflection on the question, you might read “Ugly Ducklings or Beautiful Swans? by Kim Ward of Green Earth Energy Homes. And here s a news story on Fort Worth’s first LEED-Platinum certified home.

All this talk just drives me on faster to my upcoming essay series on Fort Worth Utopia — in which I plan to write about where we should try to be in 50 years. 

This is really hard for me to believe, but this morning when I was in my son’s room, trying to help him find some uniform trousers, I saw the Apple laptop on his dresser, under a pile of what can fairly be called teenaged boy room garbage – a mixture of dirty clothes, cheese stick wrappers, unused school books, and clean clothes.

“What is my computer doing in here?” I asked him.

“It’s been in here for a while. I was using it to watch movies.”

“Don’t you realize it’s dead?” I opened the screen. And the screen flickered and lit up, in the midst of using the Apple DVD player.

“It’s alive!” I cried.

My son shrugged. I don’t think he ever realized it was gone. He gave me the power cord, which he’d repaired with black electric tape after it was attacked by the puppies. Was that the problem? Something as simple as the power cord? I didn’t think so, and yet, I had to admit: I have no explanation for this recovery.

It lives! I’m typing on it right now. And as a result of this rebirth, all the worries that I had about health, about money, suddenly seem as ephemeral and foolish as my conviction that the Apple Laptop was ready for the landfill. It seems symbolic of something–not just spring, not just that I don’t really know everything, but that miracles can occur. All my negative thoughts, all my worries and conjectures about Bad Things, they’re all completely empty in the face of the miraculous. It’s almost as if I can hear a deep, disembodied voice repeating behind me,

“I fixed the laptop, oh you of little faith.”

This afternoon while returning from picking up my son from a scout camping trip, we drove past an Estate Sale sign. My husband, the bargain hunter, noted the sign had been updated to  “1/2 off Sunday.”  This was all it took to get him to follow a curving path around the subdivision to where a group of a dozen or more vehicles was parking in front of a modest brick house on a quiet street, practical from the exterior, and on the interior, much the same.

A kitchen displayed various pots, pans and bakeware and also contained a nice gas stove, not for sale. The person who lived here had spent a lot of time cooking, from the look of the tinfoil covers under the burners, the well used color of the tupperware.

In the back of the house, it was clear that a young male artist had been living in the rear bedroom, where a large, unfinished canvas landscape of a highway leading into prairie hills had been abandoned and splashed with white paint. Below, a row of Nikes, and in the closet, t-shorts with anime decals. A grandson?

In the front room, there were a selection of pantsuits — many of which were red — along with other clothes, only $1 each. In the middle bedroom I found a selection of girl’s dresses, including a pink gingham the right size for an eight year old with a yellowed white lace collar. I sighed, realizing it had once been a pretty dress but was now dated and worn. The person who had not been able to throw it away may have been remembering the child it represented. I’ve got things like that in my closet.

In a box by the rack of clothes was a type of headgear I’d never seen up close. I bent to pick one up. It was purple and white and covered with protective plastic, the shape of an oversized military forage cap with a large “P” on the front. It was a drum majorette’s hat from the 70′s. I imagined the girl who wore it, dancing in white boots, and the mother who watched, and it as she had the gingham dress.

I put the majorette’s hat back in the box. Pascal High School no longer draws students from South Hills; we’ve been redistricted to Southwest High School but this was archaological evidence that from the beginning it was not so.  I felt a sense of lang syne. Where were the artist and the drum majorette now? And the woman who liked to cook, who wore the red pantsuits? They seemed so close and yet so far away.

As I walked back out into the front yard under the shade of a large tree, my husband told me he’d found a perfect small desk for his bookbinding hobby. “Don’t know what it was for,” he said, but now it was a steal at $5. I looked at the back where a long thin opening ran along the back.

“It’s for the printer paper,” I pointed out. “You remember when the paper used to come in a long perforated roll.”

He nodded. Where had the desk fit into the family? I felt I knew them a little bit — except for a nagging question. What had happened to the dad?

Another long sigh. It was the 70′s after all. Perhaps he didn’t find the children and their interests as absorbing as the woman in red, and drifted away. There were so many like that.

No, this is not a post about visiting Log Cabin Village, though I’ve heard that it’s great. This is a post on the ongoing discussion at Cowtown Chronicles focusing on sustainability.  And about my ancestors who homesteaded outside of Wells, Minnesota (not far from where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived during the time of her book On the Banks of Silver Creek, in the vacinity of Walnut Grove.)  Since it was a 20 mile walk into town, my pioneer forebears had to live a sustainable existence. It was live sustainably or die! I wonder regularly what would happen to us moderns if we were put in a similar state. Would we kick the bucket or learn to be independent?

I think about pioneers not just on long car trips, when I muse over the difference between travelling on the interstate in a car and over the Oregon Trail in a wagon, but every day when I look at all the plastic stuff and the artificial entertainment devices we use, from PSP gamestations to DVD’s. Would my ancestors recognize me as their decendant? Do I still possess some part of whatever they had that helped them survive alone on the Minnesota prairie?

Since the inception of the TV we have been told that the new “pioneering” is being done via the creation of products — a pioneering new soap, a revolutionary vehicle.  What I want to know is, how did an adventuring, pilgrim people–us–ever get so attached to manufactured things? These bits of plastic, electric wire and decals have nothing to do with us as individuals. How did we, a deeply individualist group (think of the Revolutionary War era motto: live free or die) come to be a people who wanted tags on everything — from Harvard to Hummer — to broadcast to others that we were worthwhile? This very branding suggests that we are the creatures of someone else. 

Back to Pete Wann and the question of sustainability — I am going to throw out the idea that sustainability depends on recognizing our pioneering, self-sufficient and adventuring roots, and throwing out commercialism and what I guess I’ll call productism.  My question, and I’ve been worried about it for at least fifteen years, is are we equal to the task of backing off productism, which results in loosing our individuality and becoming shadows of our true selves–or are we doomed to become a lesser group of people than those we sprang from?

It’s a vexing question.

I’ve been fairly anti-school lunch for a while, ever since the year when I finally let my son eat them through the fall and winter and in April he came down with Type I diabetes. I was suspicious of them before, of course, because I had eaten them once or twice as a kid, they tasted horrible then, and I couldn’t imagine they had gotten better since. What concerned me when my kids went to public school was that they seemed to think the cafeteria lunch was something you might want.

My feeling of malaise culminated as I was substitute teaching last Friday, when an entire class of 5^th graders elected to take the hot lunch and one of them said “Yeah! Free hamburgers!”

They are not “free,” kids, they are supposedly provided to the needy. School lunch comes out of the Great Depression’s milk programs, when children who were underweight were allowed to have a free milk at lunch during the school year because they were in danger of malnutrition. Parents who were struggling to feed their families welcomed this help with gratitude  because they really needed it.

The program expanded to include full lunches and then moved on to include breakfast. At some point, the nutritional quality of the lunches may have fallen, or the quality of the ingredients dropped. The scandal during the Reagan years regarding ketchup being counted as a vegetable was memorable, but unfortunately, I can’t see any signs, from the school lunches I’ve observed or the one I ate last month, that the overall quality has dramatically changed since I was a kid.

Effort after effort to wake up country to the need to provide better food in our schools have not yet been successful. And perhaps that’s because ultimately this is the parents’ responsibility. I want to enter a call to parents everywhere: if you can, try to make your kid a sack lunch. If you do:

1. You, not the school, will get his or her gratitude and loyalty, because you, and not the school, will be feeding him.

2. Your child will have better health if you simply refrain from packing food laden with trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup.

3, Your child will feel a sense of independence and the pride of not needing the school’s help.

How do I know this last? I guess I believe it because I always felt that way when I was in school. I was  safer, somehow, because my parents sent me a lunch to take to school, a kind of benediction on my school day.

Today I heard someone — who works in the schools, I will say no more — say that our public schools are not for education but for “government indoctrination.”

I just smiled and shrugged. What could I say? You can’t get into politically-focused discussions at work. But now, having come home, and thought about it, I think I can usefully comment here.

The task undertaken at the public school is a serious one, and not something that just anyone could do with a few bucks and a college degree.  Most of the class time, at least in elementary school, appears to me to be focused on reading, writing and math skills. Certainly there are other activities, but the idea that the goal of the school is political indoctrination is ridiculous. The goal of the school is literacy and numeracy, and since the No Child Left Behind act, the management doesn’t have time to think of much else.

Political indoctrination, when it is practiced on America’s young people, is usually performed by the parents. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just nature taking its course. If the parents are doing their job, there’s nothing the school will be able to say to divert the children’s loyalty.  If not, the children are already like the proverbial “reed shaken by the wind” and to tell the truth the school will probably be their next best — and only — source of credible information about life. Outside of that, there’s just their peers and Madison Avenue.

Our schools deserve a little credit here. Let’s not suggest that the old model, in which people who couldn’t pay for tutoring were illiterate, would be an improvment for anybody.

There’s been a lot of interest lately in whether blogs can cover local news to any level whatsoever. There are Fort Worth blogs that you can read that will give you some idea of what’s going on in town.  Putting “fort worth blog” into the browser will not necessarily get you the ten most relevant Fort Worth blogs (thought I’m very relieved that now FW Renaissance is at last in the top ten). In an attempt to suggest a reading list for those who want to try to keep up with the ultra-local blog scene, I’ve put together a quick list of the most-locally relevant and most-often updated blogs I know. If you know of any other blogs to recommend please feel free to add the URL and why you like them in the comments. For my purposes, the criteria are

1) Focuses specifically on Fort Worth.

2) Has a credible track record of posting no less than once per week.

3) The writing is decent. I know this is subjective.  That said, here’s the list:

For local and regional politics, club notes, restaurant reviews, etc: West and Clear.

For restaurant reviews: Fort Worth Hole in the Wall and Food and Fort Worth.

For reflections on business and real estate: Fort Worth Real Estate Blog.

For a little bit of everything Cowtown Chronicles.

And for urban design, buildings, and sustainable living Fortworthology.

I am sorry to report that soon after the burglary, the Apple G4 Powerbook failed to power up one afternoon, leaving me with two lost computers in one week. At first I was in denial, thinking that I would somehow be able to get the Apple repaired, and in fact about twenty times I went back and tried to turn it on again, in hopes that it would have changed its mind and come back to life in that mysterious way computers have sometimes but no. It was a deadster. 

I went to our local computer shop and the guy there said “we don’t fix Apples.” He said he knew a guy who might, up in Oklahoma City, but I didn’t think that sounded too great. I knew only too well that the repair could easily cost more than a new (used) G4.

This threw me into a quandry. I doubted that I could afford another Apple. But I didn’t want anything else. I asked Pete Wann at Cowtown Chronicles about local Apple repair places, but all he could say was Fort Worth Camera and a place in Arlington — there was, apparently, no super-cool back-alley shop where the Apple users could get broken laptops fixed.

I took it out of my briefcase this morning. I looked at it. My husband believes that anything that isn’t printed on paper is likely to be destroyed, not preserved for posterity, and he appears to be right about the (not too many but still) documents on the Apple, plus a couple of hundred photos and a monster movie the kids filmed using a digital camera last summer.

I’m not tossing it yet. I still have in mind to try to send it to a friend in Minnesota, who might look at it and could possibly get the documents off. But overall, I feel these days that the only place I can safely leave anything is on my website or my yahoo email account, or on paper. Hopefully, GoDaddy has got their servers backed up and their emergency plans laid, because I am trusting them.

I was sitting in my mother’s car listening to a random Willie Nelson CD when I came across the song “The Ballad of Poncho and Lefty” quite by accident. I knew the song from childhood, not from Nelson’s 1983 rendition, which topped the Country charts, but in the 1977 Emmylou Harris cover, which my parents used to play on the stereo back when we used those black vinyl records. Hearing the song again, I remembered the haunting words,  “out of kindness I suppose” and the fact that, back when I was a kid, it wasn’t really clear to me what the song was about. It still wasn’t, actually.

The tune stuck in my head for a couple of days, long enough that I got around to googling it. I discovered that the songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, was a Fort Worthian born March 7, 1944 into an old local family that could brag of oil wealth.

The song is an enigmatic one that has several blog posts out there debating its meaning. Initially people often think that it is simply the story of the death of the famous bandit Pancho Villa, killed by the Federales in 1916.  But the song becomes more complex as you listen more closely. In the beginning, the singer tells someone (himself?) that “living on the road my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean.” The song continues to Poncho’s death then switches to another character, Lefty, who runs away to Ohio.

Many who listen to the song believe that Poncho and Lefty were friends, and that Lefty sold Poncho out to the Federales. I don’t completely agree with this, after studying the lyrics, copying them by hand onto a sheet of lined paper, playing the song on my guitar and reading up on Townes Van Zandt’s biography. It looks more to me like the character of Lefty was a singer (“he couldn’t sing the blues all night long like he used to do”) who is washed up and dying slowly in a  cheap hotel instead of spectacularly being shot in the Mexican desert, the end that Poncho had. Seen this way, Lefty was someone who dreamed about Poncho’s death and mourned about his own obscurity. The song becomes a meditation on the workings of fate. At the end, we are told to pray for Poncho, “but say a prayer for Lefty too, he only did what he had to do.” What he had to do could have been, as some say, selling Poncho out, but it may have been as simple as a long, unsung  demise.

Emmylou Harris, speaking of the song, said she’s was going to play “a little Townes Van Zandt, only there isn’t any such thing as a little Townes Van Zandt, everything he did was a lot.” Van Zandt’s refusal to elaborate on the song’s meaning may be because it ws deeply personal or it didn’t make sense to him either, but the power of the lyrics and melody, which work together to enhance the feeling of loneliness and langsyne, are effective whether you think you understand it or not.

Here’s a music video of the song by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, which follows the “traditional” interpretation of the song.

Here is Townes Van Zandt singing the song in a nightclub in 1993. Note: there are several small lyrics changes from the Nelson/Jennings version.

Yes, the folks at TAMU have been looking out for us Texas gardeners, preparing a very attractive website with pictorial representations of what ails our tomatoes. If last year you had problems with blossom end rot, stink bugs, lower leaves turning brown and then falling off, or other problems, try surfing for explanations AND pictures of what went wrong so you can prevent it from happening again. Yes, in many cases, at least according to TAMU’s gardeners, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can grow your tomatoes and eat them too.

For a quick overview, view the TEAM TOMATO slideshow. This will walk you through the process of selection, soil preparation, setting in, and cultivating right up to the harvest. They answered my most burning questions! At least about tomatoes. Well I’m sorry to sound like a zealot but this is quite simply a case where it looks like the web is better than a book — faster, cheaper, and customized to Texas gardens.