Author: Mari

Well I wanted to put up a great gardening page for the main In Shaw site but left it on a remote computer, so I won’t have it till tomorrow. The gardening page was for urban gardeners and I found some really cool sites relating to small gardens, container gardens and urban issues. One site in particular I want to share is Path Project’s Urban Homestead Diary. Path Project is run by the Dervaes family who live in Southern California and try to feed a family of five on the food grown on their city plot. The site is a record of their attempt to become self-sufficient in an urban environment.

Took a look over at Ziprealty and the cheapest thing in Shaw (20001 zip code) is $299,950 1419 New Jersey Avenue a 2 bedroom 1 bath house. I guess we have now run out of crack houses to buy. Normally I would scream that the realtors are on crack. I have now accepted the realities of market forces.

There is no obvious bike parking around the New York Ave metro station. But I found something to attach the bike to. I have seen a bike attached to the station rails right near the token gates, but I figure the troll in the booth would yell at me for that. There is still construction and many, many yards of tall chain link fence around yet to be built offices. I attached my bike to the fence. Now keep in mind the bike in question is the crap bike, a rusty 3 speed thing with 1 working brake. I’m not too worried about it. Besides I have 3 locks for it. A cable, a U-lock with a round key and a U-lock with a key-key. You gotta really want my bike to steal it. Well after 3 hours of leaving it alone, it was still there. Of course the station is still new, bike thieves may not have discovered it yet.

As part of their grounds for your gardens program, you can get free used coffee grounds from any Starbucks. Well testing out this theory I found it helps to point out to employees after they look at me as if I’ve grown a 2nd head, a)where their “used” grounds are b) I use them for fertilizer (compost is too hard to think about) and c) I have a bag you can put them in. Note with plastic store bags, it helps to double them and have an absorbent newspaper under them cause they will leak.

This week I decided I wanted to hit the 4 Starbuck between the Archives Navy Memorial metro station and the Gallery Place Chinatown station. There’s 1 Starbucks every 2 blocks in this small space, silly I say. Anyway here are the results:

325 7th Street Always crowded. I can never seem to find a good time to go in and ask for grounds. So I moved on.

7th and E Across the street from Jaleo. I got espresso grounds (personal fav) and filtered coffee from the big coffee machines. Staff was confused by my request for about a minute when an older woman figured it out and fulfilled my request. She put my single plastic bag in a paper Starbuck bag. Good service.

9th and G Over by the MLK library. Young staff was totally confused by my request. Apparently there was no manager on site or anyone older than 21 working in the store. That and unlike some of the other Starbucks I have visited, they don’t dump their espresso in a drawer but directly into the garbage. So the only thing I got from them was the huge filtered coffee grounds. Not really worth the trip to me.

7th and H Streets As I headed towards the 4th Starbucks I was overcome by a superstrong smell of coffee. I could not bear the smell of it, and like the 1st Starbucks, this was also quite busy.

Another mention:

13th & U Right at the U Street metro station is the best Starbucks for coffee grounds. They used to actually have bags of grounds available but I guess not enough people picked them up. Yet with the exception of new people, I don’t get the odd look. The manager, upon request will get a nice pile of grounds without me having to explain anything.