Peace on Earth

Ah. Coffee, slippers, pig-tails & a round or two of table-tennis. Quite a morning. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Green Roofs

ERIN DUERR /Journal Star file photo

It looks like Lincoln will have another green-roof  dotting the upper portions of the city. The Urban Development Department is working on a plan to build an 11,500-square-foot green roof on a building bound by by 13th, 14th, P and Q streets.


I'm a big supporter of finding a purpose for unused spaces. Fire escapes, alleyways and roof tops are the sorts of platforms that people glance at but largely ignore. Chicago made a concerted effort to green their rooftops a couple of years ago and found that green roofs last longer than conventional roofs, provide natural insulation and thereby reduce energy costs, create peaceful retreats for people, and absorb storm water.

On a wider scale, green roofs improve air quality and help reduce the Urban Heat Island Effect, a condition in which city and suburban developments absorb and trap heat. Remember the blisters you got as a kid when you who has walked across a scalding parking lot in the summertime? Your feet felt the effect of an Urban Heat Island.

One of the most famous American green rooftops, Chicago's City Hall, combines extensive, intensive, and the intermediary semi-intensive systems on one retrofitted roof. Under the Mayor's direction, the City of Chicago's Department of Environment City Hall pilot program kicked off a citywide push to support green rooftop systems with incentives and grants.

A survey of Lincoln's green rooftops is rather impressive, actually:

• The Arbor Day Foundation installed a 7,369-square-foot green roof
• Color Court installed a modular style green roof that covers about 20 percent of the roof
• The Prairie Building at the Pioneers Park Nature Center Prairie Building has a green roof planted with drought-tolerant plants
• The former Whittier Junior High has a small green roof that serves as a test plot for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Sandhills Publishing installed a 2,000-square-foot green roof on part of its parking garage last year.
• An 8,000-square-foot green roof has been planted on the new Assurity Life Insurance Co. headquarters

According to calculations by the Lower Platte South Natural Resources District  a 7,900-square-foot green roof system has the potential to capture, store and use nearly 100,000 gallons of rainfall and snowmelt annually that normally would end up in city storm drains.

In a town of this size I think that's a pretty impressive inventory. I'm glad to think we'll have one more to add to the list.
 

Read more: http://journalstar.com/news/local/green-roof-planned-for-catalyst-one-project/article_0fd707fd-643e-50a3-a219-7112193958cb.html#ixzz1i2JbDo3k

Sandhills Trip

N's Vacation Wish Was to Practice Tai Chi On A Rock

Facebook Find

Thanks, J.

Snow Bound

There was just enough snow to keep us inside yesterday. We watched the original Muppet Movie, spoke some Mandarin Chinese, and roasted a fresh batch of orange-pecans.

Thanks, MW, for the photo!

A View From This Morning

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”  - Annie Dillard

Thanks, Kashoan, for the photo!

  

Namesake

“Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.” ― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Rough Night

Before

After

This Time Last Year

Glass Factory Tour in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

The Pumpkin Next Door

If Sponge Bob and a Zombie were to have a Pumpkin Love-Child...

Blackberry Morning

I was standing in my kitchen this morning, checking my work email inbox from a hand-held Blackberry. N asleep upstairs, the cats purring at me, my feet in socks and slippers, NPR playing on the radio, the smell of coffee thick in the cold, morning air.

I had a moment of imagining the late 80s - early 90s  version of myself looking at this scene with a sense of awe and a lot of questions.

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Personal Soundtrack: Extraordinary by Liz Phair

Prescott Park

About three years ago I was part of a group of parents who dreamed up the idea for an Outdoor Classroom for Prescott School that would benefit teachers, kids, and the neighborhood. Yesterday morning was one of a series of work-days for the park. We spent about four hours working and, when you crunch the numbers, our time accomplished the following:

• 75+ volunteers engaged
• 62 shovels present
• 7 wheelbarrows in steady use
• 3.5 yd3 of clay soil moved, by wheelbarrow, to 2 large planter boxes
• 8 yd3 of mulch distributed to garden beds and walking paths
• 78 prairie plants planted
• 3 yd3 of sand levelled into a bed
• 146 tree cut outs set in the sandbed and QuickCrete-d
• 62 chocolate chip cookies consumed
• 2 blisters on my hands worn through the gardening gloves

Sigh. It was a good morning.

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Dinner Line-up: Zucchini Frittata and baked potatoes (N's cooking)

Looking Forward To: Fright Night @ Morrill Hall 

So Long As We're Counting: Congratulations to my friend, Matt, who completed a cross trainer workout of 40 miles in 4 hours, 12 min, and 1 second. He defeated 700 aliens & saved New York...again. Well done!

Spin Cycle

I had a noisy sort of a pleasant morning. I was up early to study for classes. Just as the sun came up I went for a bike ride. It was cloudy and cool outside. Occasionally I’d look at the wet leaves, the vapor of my breath, and feel like the world had been through the spin cycle of a washing machine. That everything was somehow clean and wet and cold. It’s a sensation I like, actually. How the edges of things were sticking to each other.

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Personal Soundtrack: Sweet Melissa by the Allman Brothers

Segway-Lawncare Hybrid

Somebody has already fused the best of both worlds, here. I saw the prototype in action yesterday. I was in awe, and I laughed until I cried.

Smith Falls

Turns out that Nebraska has waterfalls. You have to go to a 20-mile stretch of the Niobrara but you'll find more than 180 of them.

This one is Smith Falls. We ported our canoe along the riverbank and hiked in to see it. The waterfalls in the Niobrara watershed are unique because of their convex faces, meaning that they bulge outward, which the opposite of what waterfalls usually do. Apparently they're convex because they're spring-fed falls and active year-round, which prevents freeze-thaw action from eroding their faces. Also, the faces are apparently protected by minerals from seeping groundwater and by the growth of algae, diatoms and lichens.

Do you feel like you've walked in on my science lecture/vacation slide show? Yeh, kinda. But I'm cool with that. Class dismissed.
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Really Excited About: http://zooniverse.org
Personal Soundtrack: So Hard by The Dixie Chicks. It's that part, near the end, that starts with "last night you told me you can't remember..." it gets me every time.

Pedaled Up

I went for a bike ride this morning in the cool, wet air. Decided to go a little retro and try out one of Lincoln's older trails in Pioneers Park.

Wow. The spin and roll of the hills made for a pretty tough ride. Gorgeous but tough. More contemporary bike trails sport a level terrain, slow with any elevation change, abandoned by the railroad lines generally. The whole idea that a person would exercise for fun is a pretty new phenomenon. We've tamed the experience to embrace more riders. But this trail was less welcoming. One built for athletes or thrill-seekers.

Silly as it sounds it was that notion that powered me through the terrain this morning. That I could be considered a thrill-seeker.
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Dinner Lineup: Penne pasta with creamy garlic sauce, steamed asparagus, white beans and tomatoes.
Recent Goodness: A Music Mix from the Lovely Ms. B
Sunday Bike Ride:13.2 miles. (Bison Trail & twice around the Pioneers Park Loop)
Excited About: The EN Thompson forum on World Issues topic this year is Water and Global Security

My Summer Vacation

We ventured to the Nebraska Star Party last week. Spotted a distant galaxy, the planet Neptune, a fuzzy dot of a comet, and the Northern Lights. On Wednesday I got an earful about the role of citizen science aspirations to track variable stars in the night sky (See: AAVSO)

Spent four hours canoeing the Niobrara River. Hiked in to see Smith Falls. Practiced Tai Chi on a quiet outcropping of rocks. Studied fossils. N went swimming every day. We camped out at Merritt Reservoir for the whole week. The stargazing/observation field, crowded with telescopes and hot coffee, was open every evening from dusk until dawn.

Sigh. It was a lovely trip.

July Afternoon

A Pleasure More Than A Necessity

I was just sitting down to lunch. You could say I'm a brown-bagger for lunch, but I'm (ah-hem) more of a reduce-reuse-recycle fabric bagger. Either way I pack leftovers for lunch rather than grab something on the go. If I'm eating out I want to do more than pull up to the drive-thru window.

So I was sitting down to left over zucchini-mint couscous and tomato-mozzarella-eggplant bake. Poured myself some fresh rhubarb lemonade and thought: I could be a gazillionaire and I could not eat better than I do at this moment.

Some things just cannot be improved upon.

Mudslingers

This morning I loaded up my bike fully expecting I'd be the only one game to go after all that rain. The trail was wet and muddy. But I had the delightful company of two fellow travelers just crazy or just lovely enough to come with me.

It was a fabulous, fabulous time!

All is NOT Lost

I'm laying in bed this morning thinking, "Woah, I am soooo tired and sore. I don't think I can move a muscle....wait...that's not true....I think I could text."

Petal by Petal

I'm a sucker for blooms. Cut, fresh, dried, potted or planted I have a thing for flowers. They offer some essential proof that, given enough of what we need, everything has the urge to grow.
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Currently Reading: Aftershock by Robert Reich
Personal Soundtrack: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Shawn Colvin (Yes, it's a cover tune. I know.)
My I'm-Cooler-Than-You-Think Parenting Moment: I was cleaning out Naomi's backpack and noticed some of her artwork resembled pointillism. After making both of us watch a pretty dry Art-History biopic on Georges Seurat, I checked out Sunday In The Park With George DVD from the city library system. She was mesmorized.