Heidi's Journal

08/14/2008 00:23 #45325

Moving Friday! Garden pictures
Category: moving

Oh my.... It's now Thursday and I've got about 36 hrs to get everything packed and either moved to storage or in the U-Haul trailer. It'll be done, but I'll be exhausted. I expect to start moving stuff into my new apartment in Buffalo around 1pm on Friday...

My previously referenced (e:heidi,45183) nonprofit organization created a community garden this year on an empty lot on the edge of the business district. The lot used to have houses on it but they were eventually condemned as being too risky in a flood zone. Here are some pix I took last week to illustrate the story I wrote for the local paper.

The lot in late April. (credit Tonya McNamara)

The lot Aug. 4.

We're having a little pumpkin growing contest for the fall festival.

One of the gardeners picked kale and zucchini for me out of her plot.

So, (e:TinyPliny), I keep thinking about your tree-planting team. I love the idea, but I didn't have a plot in my community garden, in part because I don't like to do manual labor and I don't particularly like to get diirty... how can I justify digging holes for trees in Buffalo? <grin> I supported the community garden by writing some creative grants...

leetee - 08/16/08 13:19
Hope your move went well!

Welcome to Buffalo!! :O)

tinypliny - 08/14/08 06:05
Nice photos. :) haha... I understand the not-the-gardener sentiment all too well. Though I dig getting dirty, I have a disastrous streak with all the plants I have had. I have an incredibly black thumb. I swear plants look at me and give up hope. I have killed more plants than I can count on my fingers either by too-pro-active "tending" or passive neglect. I swear the plant that I passed on my former officemate has grown a complete leaf-whorl since I moved to my new office. And its just been 2-3 weeks!

Anyway, the tree-team deadline is gone. :/ Maybe next year?

08/06/2008 16:08 #45253

Internet connection?
Category: moving

So, starting next Friday, I'll be living on Allen Street in Buffalo... What do you do for internet connectivity at home? I have no need for cable TV or telephone, but I guess I'll end up with one or the other?

Is it incredibly rude of me to ask for help moving in? I'm bringing as little as possible, but it's still stuff - bed, mattress, dressers, recliner, table & chairs, bookshelves... My friend A is coming up with me, but gosh it would be nice to have another person, even just for an hour...

chico - 08/08/08 10:30
welcome to the neighborhood, (e:heidi)!! i may be able to pitch in with the move, i'll email you off-site with details.

for the record, i'm getting "broadcast basic" TV (i.e., the major networks and PBS, local access, Discovery, TBS, TLC and a few other random channels) and "medium-speed" (?) RoadRunner internet service from Time Warner for a combined total of about $31 per month...

they're a pain in the neck though, so i agree with (e:tinypliny) for the most part. if they come to do an installation, watch carefully and make sure they don't give you stuff you don't need...the installer gave me a big, ugly converter box that was useless and unnecessary, and it was a pain to give back.

heidi - 08/06/08 17:43
(e:tinypliny) is my hero!!!

tinypliny - 08/06/08 17:17
If you are moving in the evening, I could drop by for a couple hours. I can carry stuff my size. hehehe. :)

tinypliny - 08/06/08 16:42
You have two options for the most basic internet:

1. Time Warner Cable's Road Runner Lite
Speed: 768 Kilobits Down/ 128 Kilobits Up
Price: 19.99/mo
NO yearly committment
Start up fee: $60 ($30 "activation" + $30 "installation" -> both bogus way of extracting money out of you, BTW)
If you don't have pre-existing cabling in your flat, this fee might be higher.
Details at this :::link:::

2. Verizon's DSL Dry-Loop (Without Phone)
Speed: 768 Kilobits Down/ 128 Kilobits Up (Same as above)
Price: 29.99/mo -> However, if you point out that Time Warner Cable is $19.99 for the same speed, they bring it down to $19.99. Kind of shows of how shady they can be.
A full year's painful committment. If you cancel you pay a crazy amount (~$200 now. It was $72 last year.)
Start Up Fee: Don't even ask.
Unfortunately, I opted for this last year and after a major first-bill fiasco ( etinypliny,40220 :::link:::), settled on the $29.99 plan. I wanted to switch to Time Warner this year but I am really tired of confrontations with service representatives over the phone so I just made a quick call and told them that I was canceling in an extremely pleasant voice. They said they would be switching me to the $19.99 "Retention" plan. I said thanks-very-much-I'll-take-it in one breathless whoosh and hung-up. Whew. No more contact for a year. Their service is sometimes incredibly slow and the helpdesk is no help at all, so I just press the reset button on my modem and things get slightly better. Anyway, I don't have major bandwidth needs so this works out fine.

07/29/2008 13:42 #45183

Paint & plastic

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:

tinypliny - 08/06/08 16:45
Wow. That is one beautiful cat. :)

heidi - 07/30/08 14:51
(e:matthew) - We don't know the exact year it was built because our county courthouse records burnt in 1901. We estimate it was built around 1890 and expanded in 1910.

joshua - 07/30/08 14:47
Matt - you'd love the Fenton Mansion in Jamestown. Rueben Fenton was a Governor of New York from 1865-1869, and his house was built prior to his governorship. It is preserved by a local historical society and tours are available - you'd salivate over the decorations. Believe it or not, the place was going to be torn down! I tried to find a website or pictures to link, but to no avail. I do not know why, but Buffalo seems to lack Victorian architecture of the type you see in other places locally. Just my perception anyway - it seems the closest thing we have is certain parts of the west side.

matthew - 07/30/08 14:19
wow, what a beautiful house! Do you have the year it was built, is it pre-1860's?

tinypliny - 07/29/08 19:59
That's a really nice initiative! Would you be launching it in Buffalo, as well?? :)

07/26/2008 19:44 #45152

Epic/heroic stories

tagging off (e:lauren) 's post about heroic/epic movies

... here's a telling of the Obama story as an epic...

07/15/2008 01:14 #45022

Hummingbird in office
Category: rural

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:

lauren - 07/19/08 12:23
I forgot to mention...I live just a couple blocks north of Allen on Elmwood and will be driving to UBnorth at least 3 or 4 times a week..so depending on scheduling, you are welcome to hitch a ride... I get lonely :)

tinypliny - 07/15/08 21:39
OH MY GOODNESS. I WANT TO BE AT THAT LAKE!!!! WHY WHY WHY AM I HERE?? I LOVE THOSE PHOTOS!