Month: May 2006

…don’t move into this neighborhood. More particularly, don’t move into Northern Truxton Circle. So yesterday I go out back to get my garbage can to bring to the front (because if you haven’t gotten the 10 zillion e-mails from Jim Berry reminding you that Wednesday is the new trash day, today, trash day) when I find 4 puffy little kittens on my doorstep. They were feral kitties, because one of the little guys hissed at me. If trapped, and spayed and neutered, they might be able to be adopted and turned into fat lazy house cats. I was describing this to the cat people of Square 507 and started off with, “they are black and white…” Yeah. Stop right there. Most of the feral cats around here are black and white. It is like a rule that you can’t be a cat unless you are black and white. So, I really should have known better with describing them as black and white, which is as descriptive as “cat with a tail.”
Sometime back someone lost their black and white house cat and put up signs. Sadly, it was a black and white cat. The difference between that cat and the NoTC colony, it was fatter. But with the cat people feeding the alley cats, fat is sort of relative.

News 4 reported a house on the 1200 block of New Jersey Ave has slid off it’s foundation. I was chatting with Truxtonian and he mentioned how the bricks of this houses are not built on a slab. Just bricks on dirt. Yes, people, some of you are just living on bricks, on dirt. You have no real stable foundation. Throw in a little digging, a little rain, you’ve got either a collapsed wall or, in this case, a leaning rowhouse. Looks like it may have been 1242 NJ Ave NW.
Unless you have seen your foundation, your rafters, the bones of your house, just accept that it may just be standing by the grace of G-d, and not because it has strong bones.
The DCFD also has coverage of the house as well.

Via Jim:
Neighbors,

Below please find a flyer for the MPD annual fundraiser to send kids to camp. If you or someone you know is interested in supporting this activity, please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Best,

Jim Berry
ANC 5C
——
The Chief of Police Citizens Advisory Council -Invites You to a Benefit Dinner to Send Kids to Camp

When: Friday, June 02, 2006 6:30 p.m. . 10:00 p.m.

Where: The Washington Navy Yard
Washington / Commodore / Anacostia Banquet Room
8th & .M. Streets, SE
(Use 8th Street Gate . A Picture I.D. is required)

Cost: $40.00 Per Ticket
$400.00 Per Table of 10
Door Prizes

Proceeds will be used to:

1. Send Inner-City Youth to Camp Brown
2. Construct Additional Cabins
3. Repair Hurricane Damage

Sponsored By: The Chief of Police Citizens Advisory Council

Make Checks payable to:

Joseph K. Smith Memorial Summer Camp Fund.
For More Information Please Contact:
Stanley J. Mayes – Treasurer (202) 773-3217
Rev. Thomas S. Alston – Secretary . (202) 584-4431

I’ve been looking at my backyard trying to figure out what I’m going to have for dinner and I’m stumped. I thinned out the chard and the spinach a couple of days ago and they made wonderful dishes. But those plants need more time to grow and take advantage of the space made. There are a few pea pods but really, a dish of just pea pods? I already had a big salad for lunch, so no salad. Also I want to give that some time to grow as well. The salad is beginning to look a little ragged. I have no tomatoes. The squash are still seedlings. I’m not sure what the broccoli plant is doing and the brussels sprouts are a lost cause. The strawberries are not big producers. Besides I have a whole slew of strawberries from the farmer’s market. If I take a few pea pods, a spring onion and a few spinach leaves I can greatly improve some ramen noodles. But I’m not in the mood for lots of salt.
I could defrost the trout in the freezer and make a really great dish with spring onions. The spring onions from last year are getting quite big and are begging to be used. I don’t feel like fish tonight.
Maybe I will just eat a bunch of pea pods. That, and heat up some croissants, make a cup of tea and call it a night.

Urban Spaces|Urban Places’ Frank A. Mills has an excellent post on types of neighborhoods. He starts out talking about hanging out with his neighbor. Which is the same thing I did. Saturday morning, after getting my baked goods at Catania Bakery, stopped by Justin’s as he was sitting in his front yard reading the paper. We just sat there for a while yakking away, one of his neighbors stopped by for a quick talk and later, I called one of my neighbors over (also on his way back from Catania). And like Mills, I saw that it is these relationships that we have with our neighbors that make a good neighborhood. It’s not the buildings, it’s the people.
A relational neighborhood, well in one definition “we find that a relational neighborhood is a neighborhood where residents share a commitment to the neighborhood, to each other, and to joint participation in improving their neighborhood.” One of the building block of creating or supporting the commitment and the relationships is face to face meeting. We need a place where we can meet each other on a regular basis. For some folks it is the park where you let the doggies run free. Others it’s the monthly BACA meetings and other neighborhood civic/political organizations. And maybe this is why we get so excited over businesses in or very near the TC (Truxton Circle), because it would be another place to run into each other and have that face to face contact.
Anyway, read Urban Spaces, it is an excellent post.

If you lose your drivers license on the street, if you haven’t moved there is a good chance it might come back to you. Unfortunately Mr. Joshua [insert middle name here] Meyer moved from his Adams Morgan address and I’m going to either toss it in a mailbox or cut it up as I have tried to return it to him.
Early this morning I found his license and credit cards (no wallet) strewn across the bike lane on my way to church. I’m always finding stuff in the bike lane and this is not the first time I’ve found someone’s credit card on the street. I had found another credit card a few weeks before, also on my way to church, and just dumped it off at the Whole Foods. I didn’t feel like calling the bank. The bank usually tells me to cut up the card. Or sometimes I go to an ATM and press an obvious wrong number like 1-1-1-1 and the machine eats it.
Since I found this guy’s driver’s license, I figured the good thing would be to go to said address as it was a few blocks (4 blocks, up a $#!@ hill) off my route. It was one of those apartment buildings where you have to press in a code. Well, seems the code for his apartment did not match who was in it and the speaker was crap. Short story, he no longer lives there. So I head to my original destination. Do that, go to the market, come home and I do a search for the fellow in the phone book. The number listed for him, not the right number. Later I find out, when I call the banks (why am I going through phone trees for total strangers? I dunno, I’m crazy I guess) they tell me he had a different address and they don’t have a good phone number to inform him of what’s going on. They tell me to either drop the card off at the bank or shred them all.
Why am I doing this? When I was in college I would lose my wallet all the time. It was ridiculus the number of times I misplaced my wallet and had to cancel my cards. Living here I’ve lost my wallet, a couple of times. There was a woman who did some work to hunt me down and return it to me, so I would like to do the same when I find enough information to work with. One time on election day, I found someone’s voter card and insurance card and what have you littering New Jersey Ave, retuned it to their listed address in Mt Vernon Sq after voting. But most times I just find a credit card, a bank card, and usually the name is so common it is not worth it to try to find the person. So I call the bank, they tell me to tear it up. I hate calling the bank. I have to listen to Muzak before getting a human.
Muzak. Really, no good deed goes unpunished.

Before anyone whines that they didn’t see me there, oh, I was there. I ventured into the Corcoran Design Presentations opening of the bear that is big looked around and ventured over to ‘the house of tea and dirty laundry’ and hung out over there. Then went back to a much more crowded Big Bear and hid upstairs with Scott Roberts.
Before I ran out, the first time, I got stopped by the Bear’s Stu and was asked about coffee. I know nothing of coffee. I know it comes in cans, people buy complicated and expensive versions of it, and it can be expensive. However, I don’t drink the stuff. I’m a tea person. So I was asked about tea. Lipton. At least have Lipton. I hate it when I go to a nice restaurant and they have this excellent chocolate dessert but the only tea they have is some herbal stuff (not really tea) or Earl Gray. Earl Gray’s bergmont oil can be overpowering so it is not a tea I drink with milk or anything else. A problem I find is that Earl Grey is my only black tea choice. Lipton people. Lipton. At the least have it, in the back gathering dust. I’d rather have it than a fresh Earl Grey. Add cream, sugar, I’m good. Then I started talking about the kinds of teas I have. There are a few assams, that makes for a nice rich English Breakfast tea. Then there is darjeeling and a bunch of green teas, as well as herbal infusions. You can do a lot with tea. Maybe that’s why I love Teaism so much.
With a packet of Liptons and a bunch of coffee Big Bear could have the makings of a great little neighborhood hangout. Unfortunately, I needed a little bit more light to read the presentation materials (which is why I headed to the House of Tea & Dirty Laundry). I liked the design of ‘1700’ the jazz club, not so much the idea. I like jazz but only of a certain era, and these days the only time I go out for jazz is when I can dance to it. Also one has the consider the noise level (inside and out) for the surrounding residences. I liked any sort of coffeehouse idea. If just a coffeehouse, it would be bigger than Windows (and easier for me to get to) even if only the first floor was in use. The corner space may allow for some outdoor seating as the sidewalk is big enough.

Yes, you are very important. There are things that cannot be done in this world unless whatever business you are conducting on the phone, loudly, at around 10pm.
As more people make use of their rear yards I’m becoming a bit more aware of their lives. Some more than others. There are a few folks who have decks and their voices sometimes bounce off the walls and wanders into the alley. When I’m in the backyard I can hear (and then smell) one neighbor fiddling around with his/her grill, screen doors opening and closing, light conversation with their guests, and cell phone guy. Okay, with cell phone guy sometimes I don’t even have to be in the backyard. Sometimes I hear him when I’m in my kitchen. I’m in my kitchen, with the windows closed, and I can still hear this guy.
Beyond the profanity and incoherent screaming, I think he is conducting business on the phone as I hear the word ‘contracts’ pop up on a regular basis. I pity the person on the receiving end of the call, if not for the abusive language, tone and volume, but the public nature of half the conversation. The backyard is not 100% private. Not when all of our homes are so small and close to each other. So what can be seen, heard and smelled in the backyard from someone else’s backyard is not exactly private. While I’m on this backyard kick…. kids, your homemade hookah, very ingenious, but trying to smoke it out the top of your back window is very likely to attract attention from anyone walking through the alley, looking out their window or in their back yard, ’cause it just looks weird. Instead, hang out with the kids who smoke on their back deck.
Of course in a world, a city, where people chatter on about the intimate details of their lives on cell phones while on the Metro, in the supermarket, and sadly in the public restroom, it should not surprise me that a loud cellular fight is brought to the semi enclosed back yard.

This story would be much better if I was working in the yard with the pickaxe whacking away at tree roots. But I wasn’t, I was moving around dirt with a cultivator on a pole. I have a little hand cultivator but I think the hoe-looking thing was much better for my back. While I was doing this life was going on around me. Across the street teenagers were walking on the sidewalk talking loud, being obnoxious, and engaging in horseplay. However the horseplay took a wrong turn when one of the boys put one of the girls in a headlock and would not let go. One of her friends tried to free the young woman but to no avail. I let a few seconds go by when I moved out of the yard with my cultivator and to the street saying clearly, “Miss, do you need any help?” I repeated myself. One of the other boys then yelled, “She’s got a stick!” That’s when the young man holding the girl in the headlock released her and he and the other boy jogged up the block. As they ran I yelled, “Stop being silly!” This would have been followed by “I’m not going to hurt you” were it not for the fact that the girls also moved up the block rather quickly. As I said, imagine if I had my pickaxe instead.
(okay click the date stamp 10.5.06 for full post)
Later I thought of a conversation about “engaging” or “confronting” teens on one of the neighborhood listservs. There were those who mentioned a fear of retaliation. Someone will always mention retaliation when confronting either things evil/bad or things really annoying. The headlock incident was a missed teachable moment. The kids missed a chance to hear why beating up on girls is wrong. There are other teachable moments like explaining why throwing trash on the ground is bad too. But I won’t let fear of retaliation stop me from stepping up to those teachable moments, no, pure laziness, apathy, and an unwillingness to be bothered do that for me. Retaliation is the last thing on my mind. A little bit of bravery plays into it, but it comes from the same fount of bravery for public speaking, as confronting teens or anyone else in the process of doing wrong requires one to speak publicly. There is that same risk of failure. Your audience could dismiss you or laugh in your face or become very hostile. As I said, laziness, apathy and not wanting to be bothered keep me from confronting all the wrongs people do.
The retaliation thing does bring up a question of what wrong will one stand up for and confront right there on the spot? Being passive-aggressive as I am, I tend to take the path of least resistance. Sometimes I’m moved to action. This is worrisome as I think, what would happen if I were mugged or attacked on a street filled with people like me. Of ten Mari clones, one would run out and help as the crime took place, 7 would just call 911, and the other two would be completely dumbfounded and paralyzed with indecision of what to do.
I’m more likely just to call 311 or 911.
note: I had prewritten the above the day before the rest is an addition.
Yesterday, while minding my own business in the yard I heard some kids (about 10 and 11 years old) harassing a man on the street. When I looked up from what I was doing, the man had already passed me and was heading south. So were his pants and a the dark side of the moon was out as well. The kids (two boys) pointed him out to me and sort of wanted me to ‘do something’ about it, as according to them, he had his butt all out and “showing everything”. I offered to call the police, which I did. The boys chased after the man, with a spirit of righteous indignation, harping and yelling “pull your pants up man,” and “nobody wants to see that.” When I got the dispatcher on the phone the man had already turned the corner and was out of my sight. The dispatcher told me to call again if the man reappeared. Well a few minutes later he came up the block and I called the police again. I did not look carefully, but the way his pants kept falling, exposing his rear, it would be a safe bet that the front was exposed at times as well. I reported this and the man’s description and where he was walking. The kids, who’d been trailing him, stopped in front of my gate as I was outside on the phone with the dispatcher. They said that the man threw rocks at them. A possible untruth on their side, as I did see them, but not the man, pick up some small rocks before they turned the corner. The dispatcher said they’ll send the first available car. Well the first one between now and never, I thought.
So you witness something, will the fear of retaliation be your constant guide? Or is it a mix of timing, mood and a certain act itself that will move you to stand up or do something? Or do you need to be asked? I don’t know the answer. Sometimes we’re brave, sometimes we’re cowards.