I like to geek about walkability, communities, poverty, transportation and such... Andrew Leonard's column/blog on Salon.com is a very good read. He passed along a site that allows you to check out the impact of gasoline prices on household budgets, with 2000 & 2008 color GIS maps, transportation and housing costs as percentage of household income...take some time & play with it. Use the advanced option, and the gas cost impacts link.



I'm familiar with the DC-Balto metro area, and lightly familiar with Buffalo, so I compared those - Buffalo is a -lot- smaller... My current location: Data not available.

You can zoom in to street/neighborhood level. You'll see that cost of transportation is much lower within the city, and very low in certain areas - ones that are highly walkable (Elmwood) and/or highly convenient to public transportation.


Walkability by neighborhood in Seattle

Since e:drew, e:jim & e:janelle are pondering such things as the particulars of Christian belief, I thought I'd throw out the Belief-o-matic!

(me: secular humanist)

I feel like I'm cheating by not reading everyone's posts before posting something... this whole moving thing is difficult and time-consuming, but on the bright side, I just acquired a camera after being without for way too long. I'm out of practice in both composition and technical but sometimes documenting life and communicating outweighs the artistic. My goal is to become competent, if not fluent, in my camera's functionality in the next month. Hopefully I'll have some decent shots occasionally.

We had a hummingbird fly into the office today - we often leave doors and windows open, depending on the weather and my dog's willingness to stay inside:



How cool - my camera captured a hummingbird's wings at the moment of full forward motion!



This cropped version makes it look like the hummingbird is dead and laying on a tile floor, but no, it's just a cropped, flat version of a not very good shot of something kinda interesting.

I haven't figured out how to best manage photos on my laptop - suggestions, anyone? I've got Picasa, Photoshop CS and the software that came with the camera but I'm willing to try other things. I like the Picasa upload to the picasaweb - very easy instead of having to go thru a FTP-type interface (or the additional step to keep it on my own server). But I'm not quite catching on to how to save my edited or resized stuff to be able to send it up to estrip . I think the first hummingbird photo i uploaded here is 2MB which makes me look like a stoopid noobie... I guess I am at the moment... patience, grasshopper.


I enjoyed some time at one of my favorite spots today - long enough for the sun to go down and the moon become visible.








And two cuteoverload-style photos of Nisha:



This one seems like it needs a LOLcat-type phrase on it:

tagging off e:lauren 's post about heroic/epic movies ... here's a telling of the Obama story as an epic...

In response to this post e:tinypliny,45179 about plastic bags, I worte about my community organization's efforts to reduce plastic bag usage.



We were able to give them away for free thanks to a grant from our regional solid waste authority. People are still asking me for them but they've all been distributed. We're thinking about using some other grant funding to buy more.

e:drew,44403 prompted me to look at and photograph the paint on my old house. When we bought it five years ago, the paint was all peeling - here's a picture of the side of the house that hasn't been touched yet. (I've got pictures somewhere of when we bought it, but not accessible at the moment.)




West side ainted five years ago:


West side detail of window next to porch


South side painted five years ago:


South side detail lower right corner, spigot:



Paint scraped on east side:


East side currently in progress:



Kitten, my 17+ year old cat: