Truxton Is In Shaw

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Katheryn Edin and Maria Kefalas was book #2 on the In Shaw Summer reading list because it is a study of the type of people with whom we middle class people share this neighborhood. My, that was a long run-on sentence.
I’m not done with the book and I have a hard time putting it down as it is such a good and thoughtful read. I was chatting with Nora Bombay about how this book makes me want to create a totally new sex ed course. For one, according to the authors, the girls (I’ll use girls as many have kids in their teens) already know about birth control. The problem, they have little incentive to keep it up. And another big surprise, many of their pregnancies were wanted, somewhat (17% planned, 37% unplanned and a big 45% ‘in between’ sorta yes, sorta no). Some girls said their children came a ‘little earlier’ than they wanted, but the children were wanted. So in my imaginary sex ed course I’d include things like “stuff you need to do and not do once you’re pregnant” and “child support 101: making him pay”.
Another big thread I’ve noticed in the book is it does not put men in a good light. They rarely speak for themselves in the book. If I had never met a man in my life and read this, I would think that all poor men are lying, cheating, cowardly, abusive, worthless can’t-keep-a-job to save his life, unstable, criminal, immature, sacks of DNA. The men are crappy fathers. Unlike the fathers of somewhere in a NoVa Home Depot where Saturday morning there are tons of dads with kids strapped to their stomachs roaming the aisles looking for toilet parts. So Nora tells me.
Later, when I’m done with the whole book I’ll write out a full review of this and the other books.

testing

I was reserving this title to describe my aunt’s shopping trip and her energy wasting ways but as I read today’s Post, I get angrier and angrier.

Yesterday a young Mr. John Tsombikos, age 18, was arrested after he and his associates were finally caught spray painting at 7th and V. I am glad. I hope that previous tags where he has defaced city and private property are added on to this charge. But that wasn’t the thing that is getting me going.
The bastard is from Great Falls, a f*cking suburbanite who came to the city to do his mess. What there aren’t any buildings in Great Falls to paint? DC residents who have no real voice in Congress, no representation, really high taxes, crappy schools, and we’ve had to look at his graffiti and clean it off with OUR TAX DOLLARS.
Yeah, I read his ‘reasonings’, a confused mess of trying to pay homage to a dead friend, something about youth, anti-rich people. Funny coming from a guy who graduated from McLean High School. Hey I bet they have air conditioning at McLean and never had to shut the school early because his city school was so messed up that no one could open a window.
Yes, tragic accident being born middle class and all. Some of my closest friends were born middle class, and I don’t hold it against them. But I get very annoyed with middle and upper middle class youth who think they have all the answers to poverty. Hubris. I also get very annoyed with people of all ages and income levels from the ‘burbs who come to the District and flagrantly disrespect the city and it’s citizens. John is no better than the guy from MD tags who pops out of his car to piss on H St or the guys with VA tags who buy drugs in my alley. No better, but better known.

COMMENT POLICY- Note I did not use his tag name. Neither can you. I will delete your post, even if I like you if you mention it because I do not want my site associated with that man.

Back from their vacation (or jail time) our friendly neighborhood drug dealers are back on the corner ready to serve the needs of crackheads and heroin addicts. Crap. Crap. Crap on a stick.
For a brief moment I thought they were gone. Really. For sure this time. Nope. I guess we will have to call the MPD Focus Mission @ 202-727-4501 and report it. Send them back on vacation (jail) ’cause Summer is not over yet and everyone deserves a vacation.

Worms like avocado. Found a mess of them under an avocado shell in the composter. I’ve got so many worms now I can open up a tiny little bait shop. They seem so happy in the new composter. I am very happy with the composter because it collects the “tea” the compost makes and I have been using it to fertilize the plants.
I’m getting cucumbers now. I have 2 plants in one pot and so far I’ve produced enough to give one away to my aunt, another to IT and eat two for myself in salad. I really didn’t do much except make sure they got enough water.
Things I didn’t make sure they got enough water were the tomatoes. Due to my bad watering habits, they are splitting. Tastes just as good, just not as pretty. I have several tomatoes that are turning red in the front and the back yards. I ate one last night, from one of the recycle bin plants. It was kind of small but it was quite good with a little bit of basil from the same pot, a little olive oil, basalmic vinegar, salt and pepper. Good stuff.
The squash plants seem to be taking a break from producing any great number of squash. And speaking of squash, I’ve got one growing in the ground that I don’t want. Anyone want a single squash plant? If so you’ll need to bring your own pot and dirt. I think after a certain size I may just rip it out, because cilantro would be a better bet for that space.
The blueberries are near to the end. Most of them have been picked and eaten. There are a few I’m waiting on to get the right color of blue. So far the birds have shown little interest in my blueberries, maybe because most of them are tart. It’s been a good crop, once I was able to collect a handful for my cereal.
It’s great to get so much out of such little space.

PUBLIC NOTICE
Monthly Meeting
Invited guests include the following:
Mr. Rick Rybeck
DC Department of Transportation
re. The New York Avenue Corridor Study

Mr. Joe Mama
re. The Development of the Vacant Lot on the Northwest Corner of Florida
Avenue and North Capitol Streets, NW

Jemal’s Nanny LLC and Cayre Jemal’s Peoples LLC
re. The Elimination of the Parking Covenant for the
Use of Occupants of 60 Florida Avenue, NE

Where: St. George’s Episcopal Church
2nd and U Streets, NW
When: Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Time: 7:00 P.M. until 9:00 P.M.

I got 20 tickets and I want to sell them to you.
5 dollahs.
We’ve got a date (August 13th), time (3-5pm) and I know I nominated my yard and B & IT’s backyard so we’ve got gardens for the garden tour.
This will be the 2nd Flower Power I have known. This year it will be a garden tour where you can see what we’ve done to some of the ghetto looking yards we got and turned them into pleasant backyard retreats or frontyard beauties. Also as many of us are doomed with tiny yards or almost no yard, and so we’ve been forced to be creative. Come, see us be creative! Face it you’re dying to see my container garden where I used old DC recycle bins as pots. Short of peeking over my fence the only way random strangers will see my garden is to get on the Flower Power tour.
At $5 you gotta admit it is cheaper than other neighborhood garden tours. Smaller gardens, smaller price. As it will be a walking tour, you’d also get a tour of the neighborhood, great for those of you who are curious about buying in the area.
Scott and Matt over at TruxtonCircle.Org are selling tickets as well. But I’ll take PayPal you can e-mail me at inshaw at att dot net and I can take your payment. If you live within the borders of the 1200 to 1700 blocks of New Jersey, Florida til it hits R Street, the 1600-1400 blocks of 3rd Street, everthing in between and the 400-700 blocks of S and R Sts, I can hand deliver your tickets.

Okay if you email me at inshaw at att net I can get you tickets for $5 and walk them over to you after work if you live in or very close to the northwestern part of Truxton Circle or on the 400-700 blocks of R or S streets. Otherwise you can use the button below and pay $.37 more to counter the charges Paypal put on. I think you can use a credit card using this option. Click and find out.

 

This is a later than usual post as I was at the first day of the District of Columbia’s Tax Sale, which attracts the financially and reality savvy and idiots. I missed the initial reading of the rules around 8:30AM as I arrived a little late because I wanted to add a little something to my initial deposit. No matter, the auctioneer wound up repeating several times the main rules.

Rule #1- Turn off your cell phone and pagers. You are not that important.
Rule #2- You must have 20% of your bid already deposited with the cashier’s office.
Rule #3- No children and don’t leave your children out in the hallway.

Yes, people did leave their children in the hallways. At least two kids. One kid was brought up where the auctioneer was and asked to find mommy or daddy.
Rule #2 was also constantly broken, and what would happen was the property tax lien would come back on the auction block. That’s what happened when I bid against the King of the Idiots. He got the bid about $1,000 more than what I was willing to go for and apparently he didn’t have the 20% of the $3,000 needed so the property went up again and I was outbid by $6,000.
As I said the savvy and idiots, lots of idiots.
Idiots come because they are betting on getting a property for cheap. Nope. There is a 5% chance that the property would go into foreclosure and that the pre-existing bank loan and other debts, that would need to be paid, are not burdensome.
The savvy are betting on the 95% who will pay off their taxes and the 18% interest property owners would have to pay on the back taxes. I sat near two folks who had their charts and research out. One guy had the figure of how much he could bid on top of taxes owed (which gains interest) and the surplus (the bid amount that does not gain interest) to get back at least 2% interest on the whole bid. Another person had property descriptions and I guess bid limits to get a decent return. It helps to do research on the property.
Most bids for tax liens on properties in the Truxton area were about $5,000 to $20,000 over the amount of back taxes owed. Very few were at the amount of the taxes owed with only one person bidding. Like 0521-0807 1533 4th St, which I think is part of the parking lot of the mosque.
Once all the Truxton properties were bid on I left as I learned from my last time at auction not to bid angry. So I choose not to bid. Well at least on properties I have not done a little research on.

As a Washington Post subscriber I don’t read the Express so I missed my Thursday 15 seconds of fame in the blog section of the tabloid. Thanks Libby and Jim for pointing it out.