Citizens

In late Feb, I attended the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota‘s (BikeMN) third annual Minnesota Bicycle Summit on Capitol Hill, noting that I was "trying to get smarter about the state of bike advocacy in Minnesota…" (Blog post here.)

A few weeks later, for the same reason, I attended the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota’s Day on the Hill which led to having lunch here in Northfield with Executive Director Brett Feldman and Northfield’s First Ward Councilor Suzie Nakasian in which we explored the pros and cons of forming a Northfield area regional bicycle council. (Blog post here.) Brett encouraged us to get in touch with BikeMN’s Executive Director Dorian Grilley.

So with that in mind, I attended BikeMN’s annual meeting yesterday at Park Tool’s new headquarters in Oakdale.

During the meeting, my eyes widened as we heard details from BikeMN staff and board members about the myriad of bike-related activities, projects, collaborations that they’re involved in.  (See the Education and Advocacy pages on their website for a glimpse.)

Dorian is well-connected and versed in national bicycle advocacy issues so I was pleased to hear some of the latest news, including the repercussions from Trek CEO John Burke’s speech last fall at Interbike (my blog post here).

Afterwards, I did have a chance to talk with Dorian, as well as with Nick Mason, BikeMN’s Education & Technical Assistance Program Manager.  Both offered their help to get things rolling in Northfield with a start-up of a local bicycle advocacy group and hopefully, one or more of their Bicycle Friendly Programs. (March blog post: Bemidji has earned ‘Bicycle Friendly Community’ status. Why not Northfield?)

And as I wrote back in March:

There are other [Northfield area] projects and developments that have a bicycle-component: the Northfield Depot; the East Cannon River Trail segment; the TIGER Trail (aka the Northfield Modal integration project); Safe Routes to School; the Gateway Corridor Improvement Plan; Northfield Roundtable’s Framework Plan; and the Cannon River Corridor recreational concept.

I also put on my mountain biking hat (helmet?) and with MORC Board members Reed Smidt and Mark Gavin, chatted with Dorian about how BikeMN and MORC could work more closely together. One idea: give communities with mountain bike trails and pump/jump/BMX parks extra credit when they apply for Bicycle Friendly Community status.

You can keep up with all-things BikeMN via their blog, Twitter feed, and Facebook page. And consider becoming a member. These guys rock.

Click and scroll through the photos either one at a time or via a slideshow. (Memo to self: use a flash when taking photos with my smartphone of people indoors.)

From the City Administrator’s weekly memo:

A special meeting of the Park and Recreation Advisory Board (PRAB) is scheduled for May 9, 2013 at 7:00. It is being held out at the Maintenance Facility, 1710 Riverview Drive. The PRAB will be discussing the location, cost for soil corrections and other related concerns about the skateboard park. Since this is a special meeting, the Skateboard Park will be the only item on the agenda.

Today begins a holiday weekend in SE Minnesota, well, it started yesterday, but so did the snow, so we’re getting a late start.

100 mile garage sale!

Clean up started in earnest today, they had a bucket truck, bobcat and pick up, and I woke up to a chorus of chain saws.

The office is CLOSED today!

This was the scene through my living room window at about 7 a.m. yesterday. The official snowfall in Northfield was 6.8 inches.


Here are some of our daffodils, which had just struggled into bud during the warmth of the past week. On Sunday it hit 81 F.!


In this return to winter, I've noticed starlings (above, in tree) coming to eat from our suet feeders, which I don't remember ever happening before. I cropped the photo to show the leaf buds which are finally swelling.


I've read on the MNBird listserv that Baltimore orioles have been sighted in the region, so despite the snow I put grape jelly in the oriole feeder and hung it up this morning. Hummingbirds often arrive around now, as well. 
With very few insects, little spring growth, virtually no flowers yet, and last year's seeds and berries pretty well picked over, birds and other animals are facing a tough situation. Continue to put out a variety of high-quality bird foods (small and larger seeds, nuts, suet, jelly, even hummingbird nectar) to help at least some of them get through this.
Facebook birders were abuzz yesterday over Greg and Linda Munson's photo, shared by the Zumbro Valley Audubon Society (based south of here, where they got even more snow) of a Canada goose faithfully incubating her eggs while chin-deep in the snow. 

Much of the snow melted yesterday, but it is snowing again this morning. That is supposed to turn to rain, and we should be back into the 60s and low 70s in another two or three days. Hang in there, birds and people.

One of the enjoyable aspects of writing a blog is that it allows me to virtually meet people I likely would never otherwise encounter, and exchange information with them about a mutual topic of interest. I have made the acquaintance of several people that way in the last couple of months, including Ross Swanson, whose father, Arthur, played trombone in the St. Cloud Municipal Boys’ Band under the direction of my great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs.

Art joined the boys’ band in 1929 when he was 12 years old. “He later taught me to play the trombone, and he never stopped telling me about the impact that G. Oliver Riggs had on him during the years that he played in the St. Cloud Boys Band,” Ross told me.

The St. Cloud Municipal Boys’ Band in 1930 Ross’s paternal grandfather, Solomon Swanson, emigrated from Sweden to Minnesota in 1903 and went to work for the Hilder Granite Company in St. Cloud as its chief blacksmith. Solomon and his wife Ida raised their family in Swede Hollow, a neighborhood located near the St. Cloud State Reformatory. Art was the youngest of their seven children (Ross writes about the history of the city’s granite industry in this account, St. Cloud Granite).

In an essay Ross wrote about his dad and his trombone playing, he explains that it was Art’s sister Lillian who gave Art the $10 he needed to buy his first trombone. She had a job working at Herberger’s department store. He was 11 at the time, and he joined the boys’ band the following year, in 1929.

Art continued to play the trombone through his teen years. When he was 16, he played on the weekends for the Stan Zontek Dance Band. And when he was 17, he played a gig one night with Lawrence Welk and His Hotsy Totsy Boys, filling in for their sick trombone player. He graduated from Technical High School in 1935 and received his elementary school teaching credentials in 1937 from the St. Cloud Teachers College.

Arthur E. Swanson, 1917-1996 Ross was born in St. Cloud, but his family moved to Duluth in 1950 and later to California, where his dad worked as a machine shop manager for Hughes Aircraft Company. When Ross turned 11, Art bought his son a used 1948 Olds Ambassador trombone and taught him to play it. Ross says his dad was a great teacher and encouraged him to continue playing throughout junior high, high school and junior college.

Now a resident of Redding, California, Ross writes regular “remembrances” about growing up in Minnesota and California for a website in Cook, Minn., that is owned by a friend of his. One recent essay, “The Music Man,” is about G. Oliver Riggs. You can read the entire essay if you click here and scroll down past his essays on Marshall-Wells and the Blue Laws.

In the “Music Man” essay, Ross writes that his father described G. Oliver as “a stern disciplinarian who demanded perfection from the boys. He would walk around the band room during rehearsal, and if he heard a wrong note he would rap the offender on his head or on the back of his neck with his baton. He would ask the boys how much practice time they were getting, and later he would contact the parents to see if the boys were being truthful. ... The boys may have feared him as a disciplinarian and task master, but they grew up to truly love and appreciate G. Oliver Riggs.’”

It’s always gratifying to hear that my great-grandfather made a lasting impression upon his young musicians, although I do feel bad for those who became better acquainted with G. Oliver’s baton. And it’s amazing to consider how a sister’s generous gift of $10 reaped rewards that can’t be calculated in dollar amounts.

Need I say more?  Well, there is more coming down, it’s snowing steadily…

Guy from City just came through with a front end loader and rammed into the tree and ripped it apart and plowed it over to the side:

What a mess.  Once they get a plow through, snow seems to melt and it’s passable, but all over the walks and yards, it’s just sitting there.  Nobody is moving.  Mailman was climbing around the tree limbs, they’re everywhere.  If I could get out, I’d seriously consider heading to Costa Rica.  This is absurd.

A crew from the Weather Channel was broadcasting from Bridge Square last night as it started to snow.

I took these photos shortly before 6 am. It seems like we got more than 6 inches of wet cement again (last week the total was 6.5). I may take more photos and turn it  into another album but I still have more photos from last week that I’ve not sorted through. Jeesh.

It’s suddenly summer. Last Tuesday we got 6 inches of snow here in Northfield but by Friday it was 65, yesterday 70 and today near 80.  The  trails along the MN River Bottoms dried out in a hurry so today I spent a few hours on the segment between Hwy 169 and 9-Mile Creek.

I captured some video of me riding a few of the log skinnies there and edited them into a 2-minute video, including two of my many crashes. 

There are evidently lots more logs down there I’ve yet to find, as evidenced by this blog post with many videoclips by Heath Weisbrod.

And spring. Even here in this rented Vermont house with clod-covered nails, gravel and clay out the backdoor, I scratched today on the earth and dropped seeds into it, chard, kale, cilantro, romaine, with the hope and certainty of sunlight, warmth, and rain.

This burst of warmth brings so many woodland flowers into bloom, and on a sweet hike today we saw trout lilies and bloodroot, and many others whose names I don’t know but whose color brightens the damp forest floor in these early days of sunlight.

Last week I saw the excellent documentary Chasing Ice by James Balog, who’s tracked glacial retreat using time lapsed photography to show the staggering loss of some of Earth’s most significant glaciers in mere years, photographic certainty of massive climate change. I left the film feeling really cynical because even among the people who recognize the central importance of climate change, few of us are doing anything about it. Sure, we might buy our lettuce at the co-op, or carry canvas bags, but every morning in this small town of 6500, I’m in a crush of traffic as all of us who know that climate change may fundamentally alter life on Earth drive our kids to school, pick them up, drive them to tennis or swimming or soccer practice, ad nauseum. We want fuel-efficient cars so we can continue to drive as wantonly as we do, with no impediment to our routines. “If only those climate-change deniers recognized that they’re wrong!” we think, as we wait for the red light to change. We’re hoping for a big policy that will make the difference for us, but it’s not going to happen. Reversing climate change is not like banning DDT.

The Clean Water Act did a good job of curtailing point source pollution (the kind that comes, for the most part, from a single point, like a factory), but we’ve learned in the intervening decades that non-point source pollution (the kind that comes from everywhere – your lawn, your neighbor’s cows, the runoff from a parking lot) is just as malign, and its ubiquity makes it even harder to regulate or reduce. So, while Lake Erie’s water quality improved when some of the biggest polluters were forced to clean up their discharges into the lake, many of our nation’s other rivers and lakes have continued to deteriorate. And you and I are the non-point sources of increased carbon dioxide emissions, and it’s not until you and I and many, many others change our own habits that complement and strengthen any hoped-for policies that we should expect to see atmospheric C02 decrease.

So here I am with my sourdough bread, glad that I’ve nurtured wild yeasts in my starter. I wrote in my last post, after thinking about what a sour ferment is, that if food is alive, we have to pay attention to what it’s doing, not what a recipe is telling us to do. Working with a live culture necessitates that we pay closer attention to the thing we’re making. For me, this doesn’t mean I have to drop everything when I’m making a loaf of bread, but the usual four cups (or whatever) of flour a recipe calls for may not reflect how the starter is absorbing the new ingredients.

I’ve used a Zojirushi bread machine for three years and didn’t utilize its versatility until I started making sourdough. Lately, I’ve sometimes stretched rising times to twelve hours or more, incubating those wild yeasts in a warm, stable environment. Other times I’ll knead the bread for thirty or forty minutes and in that time the bread turns into a sponge-like batter and I have to add another two cups of flour to the mash. I continue to experiment with times and ratios, and my kids have complained a lot more this year as their peanut butter sandwiches are sometimes made on bread sour enough to be traded for an Atomic Warhead. Other times a loaf comes crashing down after rising to zeppelin heights, or remains gummy no matter how long it’s worked. Bread is alchemical, and making it without commercial yeast lets me appreciate the long history of nurturing food cultures that shared knowledge and starters and cultures when there were no stores to provide for us.

Playful, meaningful connection with the world outdoors needs to be a fundamental ingredient of every childhood. An integral part of the Montessori philosophy is the belief that children learn through personal experience. The summer at Montessori Children’s House focuses on increasing the child’s awareness, particularly in the area of life sciences. The summer is an ideal time for exploration of our natural areas, bird life and other animal life surrounding our school. The children plant and maintain their own garden of flowers and vegetables.  Many practical life activities like washing, scrubbing and polishing are moved outdoors. The program is designed to involve children in environmental education through interactive stories, songs and games.  They create arts and crafts projects and conduct experiments and scientific studies.  Regular cooking classes take place in our summer kitchen and feature healthy products picked from the garden. Outdoor exploration includes nature walks and scavenger hunts as well as tending our MCH garden and creating a mini-Farmer’s Market and lemonade stand.

A special session in late summer focuses on increasing the child’s awareness, particularly in the area of music learning.  Parents recognize the earliest signs of musical interest when children begin to capture portions of songs and move in response to music. To reinforce a child’s spontaneous musical activities leads to enhanced natural development of communication, expression, and cognition. It is also a lot of fun! Along with the American Orff-Schulwerk Association we at MCH are united in our belief that music and movement—to speak, sing and play; to listen and understand; to move and create—should be an active and joyful experience.   

Summer programs at MCH are open to current, past and future families who seek a nature based play environment where their children can explore and learn in a community of friends.

For more information visit our website or call 645-2445.                      
 

For instant spring, plant some pansies. Garden centers are full of them now.

Imagine if the hunter or fisherperson in your household was told that the opening weekend had been moved back two, maybe three weeks? Anxiety? Disappointment? Lots of pent-up energy? Yes, to all that, as we gardeners well know having endured one of the most protracted ends to winter that I can recall. But, this weekend is it! The weather promises to be pleasant and warm. So, here’s what I plan to do:

• Clean up the gardens you can reach easily. You don’t want to be tramping around the yard too much (something I’ve been guilty of already this year). And you absolutely do not want to rake — let the soil firm up and dry out. But, if you can reach a bed from the sidewalk or other terra firma, clean up spent perennials and uncover any of those plants that want to grow.
• Buy some pansies! If you think you have been anxious to get out in the garden, imagine how nursery and garden center owners feel. Many garden centers will be open for the first time this weekend. Visit them, enjoy the beautiful plants they have in their greenhouses and buy some pansies to pot up for instant spring.
• Plant a little lettuce. I’ve started some lettuce indoors and those plants have been moved to pots and put on the front porch. But it should be warm enough now to  plant out lettuce or even start some from seed. Hold off on tomatoes or any warm weather crops.
• Prune Annabelle hydrangeas and other plants that bloom on new growth. Hold off on pruning lilacs and other spring-flowering shrubs until after they bloom.
• Build a raised bed. Easiest garden project ever. I’ve built several and have a new one in the garage ready to go out to the vegetable area in the next week or so. (If you want to get really fancy, check out my brother-in-law’s deck garden.) You can fill your bed with compost and soil to create a fabulous environment for vegetables. If you are not sure what to grow, check out Chiot’s Run’s 5-by-5 Challenge, which gives you suggestions and planting tips to grow a simple 5-by-5 foot vegetable garden.

What will you be doing this beautiful weekend?

 

Related posts:

1. A Wonderful Weekend for Weeding Is there any more satisfying experience for a gardener than...
2. What to Do in the Garden This Weekend It’s still a bit nippy, but the wind has died...
3. A Busy Weekend for Gardeners As parts of Minnesota recover from a March blizzard and...

They did change the headline, but the Red Wing Republican Eagle (“the Beagle”) printed my Commentary on Wednesday (the same day that the Public Utilities Commission postponed the Goodhue Wind May 2nd agenda item until June 20th!):

Commentary: Respect blows strong for Earth and citizens

By: Carol Overland, The Republican Eagle

As I write this on Earth Day, I’m preparing for the Public Utilities Commission’s meeting next week which may seal the fate of the proposed Goodhue Wind project.

This is a poignant example of our obligation to respect the earth and its residents. By whatever name, this wind project has failed abysmally on all counts.

Citizen groups, individuals and elected officials have worked on this project for almost five years, and they have learned not only about this particular project, but about wind generation impacts.

Participation is the foundation of our democracy, and the people showed up, building their credibility at every turn. Local government wrestled with divergent interests to responsibly address the issues at stake. At tremendous cost and effort, residents learned to navigate regulatory agencies, respectfully participate in many meetings, research and consult experts, network with others, meet with county, federal and state agencies and committees, join a contested case, hold informational meetings with films and speakers, write comments and press releases, and testify before decision-makers. It’s been an exhausting rollercoaster ride.

Why pull the plug? The project has fallen apart.

T. Boone Pickens took his financing and turbines, abandoning the project. Trishe Wind, purchaser of National Wind, rejected the project. NSP declared the Power Purchase Agreements in default and rejected all subsequent proposals.

Ventum Energy, the sole local interest, was administratively terminated last August. New owner New Era operates out of a P.O. Box and doesn’t pick up mail.

There’s nothing left.

This project fails as a matter of energy policy, because it would not replace a single megawatt of fossil generation or reduce CO2 levels. The Renewable Energy Standard is a mandate to add generation, but it’s not “either/or,” because there’s no replacement or shutdown of fossil generation.

We have an electricity surplus, and the RES adds to that surplus, which utilities sell on the market rather than cut fossil generation.

Xcel Energy doesn’t need Goodhue Wind because it’s met its RES quota far ahead of schedule. Further, Goodhue Wind is not locally owned, not locally financed, and is not community energy development by any definition.

Developers utilized unethical practices in securing land contracts and silencing those who signed them, pitting neighbors and family members against each other. Much is deemed “trade secret,” but landowners are backing out, and the project’s land control is in doubt.

The Public Utilities Commission has asked reasonable questions, and New Era has not answered.

Environmentally, the Goodhue Wind project would do much harm. Despite Minnesota’s unfortunate exemption of wind projects from environmental review, we learned that “renewable” doesn’t mean there are no harmful impacts.

This project is located along the largest migratory bird pathway in North America. Eagles nest in the project footprint and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the project would kill eight to 14 eagles annually, 160-240 dead eagles over a 20-year project life.

The developers haven’t completed avian and bat surveys, one monitor has been hanging broken for seven months, and they refuse to comply with USFWS modeling guidance. Contractors have exhibited gross arrogance in conducting surveys and in contacts with landowners, including alleged trespassing and initiating legal action against a lawful resident, enraging the judge who dismissed the case.

Were the project built, it would be without regard to the residents and livestock, with turbines closer than the county ordinance prescribes, and closer than recommended by the Minnesota Department of Health.

If built, the project would inflict low frequency noise on adjacent residents and subject them to shadow flicker for which Commerce suggests “shades” as mitigation. The only way to mitigate the impacts is to site with adequate setbacks, such as the one-half mile buffer which the health department notes should eliminate complaints.

Wind must be sited correctly, because turbines aren’t easily moved.

This is Earth Day. It’s not about “being right” but about “getting it right.”

 

Carol A. Overland of Red Wing is the attorney for Goodhue Wind Truth.

 

Go, Edina--let them eat cake!

To Hold Back Or Not To Hold Back? Views On Redshirting « CBS Minnesota

I love it when this happens, it’s almost as good as the results of a google image search for “Excelsior yahoos” this morning:

ER13-1049 Order on Filing

Big thanks to a little birdie who relayed the good news:

hee hee hee hee hee, I LOVE it when this happens…

Northfield News: “Riverside Park soil presents issues for Northfield skate park“

The Northfield News is reporting that the soil conditions in Riverside Park are “so poor” that they would require extensive (and expensive) remediation in order to support a skateboard park. The News article also provides an update on the design and fundraising effort.

Here’s the story on Northfield.org.

I have occasionally joked with friends about the idea of making the G. Oliver Riggs story into a musical. Turns out, it’s not such a wild idea. The History Theatre in St. Paul has announced its 2013-14 season, and one of the shows is about the Minneapolis Working Boys Band, a contemporary of (and occasional competitor to) my great-grandfather’s St. Cloud Municipal Boys’ Band.

The theater’s press release describes the world premiere show as “a celebration of community, music, love, and patriotism.” Working Boys Band, with book and lyrics by Dominic Orlando and music by Hiram Titus, will be performed May 3-June 1, 2014.

The Minneapolis Working Boys Band/photo from the History Theatre website The Minneapolis working boys band was organized in 1918 by Professor C. C. Heintzman as a way to give boys a positive activity that would keep them out of trouble. The band continued through at least the mid-1930s; I first became aware of its existence when I saw it mentioned in events connected to G. Oliver and his band. For example, in 1930, the Minneapolis Working Boys Band was one of 26 bands that competed in the second annual, two-day state band contest, organized by G. Oliver and held in St. Paul (The St. Cloud boys took second place in the marching contest, losing to the St. Paul Police Band. The Brainerd Women’s band and the Sleepy Eye high school band tied for third place).

The later director of the Minneapolis Working Boys Band, William Allen Abbott, was a friend of G. Oliver’s. He was one of the guest directors who filled in for G. Oliver in 1936 when G. Oliver was in the hospital (I wrote about it in this September 2011 blog post, Pinch-Hitting for G. Oliver).

In addition to Working Boys Band, the History Theatre’s new season includes other intriguing shows, like Tim O'Brien’s The Things They Carried, based on the Austin, Minnesota native’s book about his experiences in Vietnam; Lonely Soldiers: Women at War in Iraq; and Baby Case, about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

The theatre is selling subscriptions for the 2013-2014 season now through December 8, 2013. Single tickets for all shows will go on sale Tuesday, July 9, 2013.

This spring break I did not attend the annual AMS conference (I do intend to listen to some of the workshops via the folks at EGAMI A/V). I did visit an intriguing Montessori site, though, while in Pasadena, CA.
The Aria Montessori School on Euclid Avenue dates back to 1913 and surely must have been the school attended by Julia Child. It was also visited by Maria Montessori herself in 1917 a few years after her famous demonstration class at the pan-pacific expo in California.

 

Northfield’s Complete Streets policy has been recognized as one of the top 10 policies in the country for 2012 (we ranked #5 out of the 125 Complete Streets policies adopted in the US in 2012). What’s so great about having a Complete Streets … Continue reading →

Last week I fully joined the standing-desk trend. I had bought a tall “cafe table” for my office a couple years ago, and intermittently used it as a desk, but last Tuesday I finally moved my computer to that table.

Standing Desk

A week into the experiment, I’m ready to say that it’s been a great arrangement. About the only problem so far is that my table doesn’t have enough surface area for much besides the computer and my iPad, which I use as a second screen. I can’t, for instance, easily put a printout or a magazine on the tabletop to consult while I work.

On the other hand, standing has already had several benefits. I’ve found that I’m much more likely to move around more, whether walking across the suite to get a glass of water or just to pop out of my office to chat with someone else. Even when I’m at the desk, I’m hardly stationary: I’m constantly shifting my weight and position. Being upright seems to help a little bit with my ability to focus on my work, too, but that might be due to the fact as that I’m closer to the screen than I had been while seated at my desk.

The biggest payoff, though, is that I am far less sore and achy at the end of the day than I had been after a day of sitting. Even on days when I go to the gym, my legs and back feel good – warm, loose, energized – when I pack up to head home. That’s a pretty nice surprise.