Either way, I bet the salad bar is really notable.
It sounded kind of nice so I was looking for a reason not to hate these people. I gave up at "My kids eat kale right out of the ground, like candy," one resident told me, before suggesting an essential oil regimen to cure my chronic ear infections.
Unless they're the Rajneeshees! They poisoned a bunch of people with salmonella in the salad bars all over Oregon, which was a test run to poison the water system.
Free range kids grazing on kale. What's not to love?
I know three things about Oregon:
1. Rainy
2. Where young (white) people go to retire
3. Cult that spread shit on salad bars
6: How's about we oil your ears up and see how it goes?
6: Just wait till they say it's time to unplug from your devices.
3: Which was an attempt to win a local election by minimizing turnout. Let's not give anybody ideas in Alabama.
There was a Rajneesh meditation center a few miles away from where I lived growing up (Southern Cal., not Oregon). I was aware that it had a vaguely sinister reputation, but never got the details. It was sold and converted into a day care center in the mid 80s.
I don't think they got to the salad bars in my town.
80s daycares are never sinister.
12: Unless they have Satanic-baby sacrificing cults running them.
I want to send my kids to Professor Standpipe's Joke-Explaining Daycare Center. Way better than Montessori.
Thank god I got 14 in under the wire, or I would have been comment 5 all over again.
I was sitting around waiting for 14 so I could start working again.
It's like you wrote a joke intending for the next person to explain it back to you!
My cousin just used a very modest tech windfall to buy a farm not too far from a college town where he can keep horses and grow corn. I have less than zero envy for that particular move. There is no goddamn way I am dealing with horses on myself or trying to grow food myself. Unless I was in some kind of rich feudal baron type situation and had a team of serfs and servants to take care of the horses and deal with the crops and I could visit them once a year as a lark when I grew tired of my townhouse in the city or my vacation home which would definitely be someplace nicer than some random field.
What does he grow corn for? You can only eat so much and you're certain to lose money as a hobbyist.
That's what's there now. I guess he could convert it to a kale farm but he isn't coming to me for agricultural advice so I dunno. Also he grew up in Manhattan and to my knowledge has logged zero time on John Deere.
I want a country retreat, but agriculture isn't part of the dream*. A little cluster of cabins in the woods within biking distance of a non-shitty market... paradise.
*the original dream included goats, because I got very into the idea of having goats, thanks to Mother Earth News. Like most of my youthful dreams, I've abandoned the idea.
My cousin farms about 900 acres of corn. He has a tractor that steers itself.
I would like to live where I could do a little bit of small-scale farming or large-scale gardening. Or at least I think maybe I would. I just can't picture living among people that self-consciously doing that kind of thing.
Part of the problem is that what I do not want to do is take care of a lawn. I've had enough of that for a lifetime.
I guess he could convert it to a kale farm
If he does that, he'll have to build a big fence around it to keep the free range kids from eating his crops.
We're actually designing a large-scale garden for the next place we live. I am fairly confident I will enjoy that, because I have consistently gardened every year for the last twenty. I'm putting a lot of thought into 'so help me god, I am never weeding walkways again' and 'why does the garden bed have to be so damn low?'.
Gardening and other people. All it's missing is waterboarding.
Go around back of the community pool's changing room after 10:00 p.m. wearing a UC Berkeley sweatshirt. Ask for "John."
This city has a program where for $20 they will rent to you a 19 x 25 foot plot of land at the back of the cemetery on which you can have a garden for the season. Come spring, I'm thinking of getting one on which to grow my kale and bok choy.
They had that in my neighborhood, but it turned out that people not on the waiting list died faster than people on the waiting list so you can't do it now.
Seems to me that there must have been a huge rush to get on the waiting list if it actually helps to prevent death.
I'm a whiz at the grocery store.
Well, Ima wiz in my garden, but I'm hoping nobody sees me.
38: While "Ura Hogg" is apocryphal, "Ima Hogg" was a real woman of considerable social standing, wealth, and corset-rocking ability. She had to endure jokes her entire life but her good humor remained and her charitable foundation continues to this day.
Contrary to popular belief, Ima did not have a sister named Ura
Or Jefferson Davis Hogg Airplane? I guess that's what they use as a crop duster on an agrihood.
This thread is really meta for a thread based on an article in Amtrak Magazine.
40. That's a terrible thing to do to a helpless baby. Child protection should have got involved.
The interesting insight here is that people buy houses in golf developments who don't play golf because they like the open space.
An interesting contrast with Yggles' incessant calls for Manhattanizing DC (and everywhere else).
My subdivision has quite a bit of open space. We're not growing kale, just the wild grasses and trees that are native to the area.
My ideal: Density at inside périphérique levels so largely 5-7 stories (residential, commercial and communal services interspersed) with masses of transit and generous provision of communal neighborhood oriented open space including sports fields and allotments, theatres including rehearsal spaces, swimming pools, libraries, places for the oldsters to do their morning exercises and bingo nights, etc.
So who cleans the toilets in Omelas?
51 gets it exactly right. Instead, we get all-glass highrise condos, mostly sold to people who don't live here.
It doesn't sound like residents have to actually work on the farm.
Anyhow, one of my sister's friends got married in this community. It was apparently very nice.
If I wanted to get married in a community, I'd join the Moonies.
51 is Roc North, though the public spaces aren't proportionally big enough.
Interspersed with lots of high-rises too. Also, Amtrak has an in-train magazine! Which they helpfully digitized, so you can get your in-train fix between trains!
I have taken home copies of the magazine before. I think this all means that I'm The Worst.
The airlines all say you can take the magazine. Why would the train be different?
52 is it, basically. It's just another kind of luxury development. Give it a few years, you'll be able to move to Magnolia Big House Agrihood and savor the convict-grown organic mint in your juleps.
People who use convict labor and who drink sugary drinks on a regular basis are the worst.
at some point here i rolled out my proposal to redevelop all of sf west of arguello along the lines in 51 and was howled down by outrage. ha. there would be plenty of victorians left east of arguello and the west of the city would have a fighting chance of being a fantastic place to live. absurd and depressing we can't manage to (re-)build urban environments providing the quality of life the US UMC flocks to for their european vacations. there's a reason everyone loves that afternoon they spent hanging out on a cafe terasse in a workaday parisian neighborhood watching the world go entertainingly by.
You'll get your chance after the Big One. And Victorians are shit. I grew up in one, the architecture is totally impractical. It presumes full-time servants to dust the fucking ornamentation.
I don't mind houses being close together, even attached, but I like my house with my own patio and my own front door.
The solution for ornamentation that is impractical to dust is to let the dust collect. That's what I do with all of the relatively recent crap we have that collects dust.
I'm sitting in a Victorian right now. Its got charm, but its fucking cold and the layout is screwy. Also, mice.
See? Shit. The only time we didn't have rats in the ceiling was when we had feral cats instead.
Not far from 51 is (non-NYC*) garden apartments and what in Pgh are called housing terraces. One of the signal examples was written up by AB, of course, but the general form of dense housing clustered around green commons, with pedestrian and traffic flows separated, makes for delightful housing that's far denser than detached housing, but generally preferable for any set of preferences that isn't purely antisocial (note that you don't have to maintain any lawn). Co-housing often takes this form as well.
Yes. My housing situation is pretty set up personally but when people ask me where they should try and move in LA, I often tell them to try and find a place here, if one's for sale. There are other examples of garden apartments, including Park La Brea which is more well known, but that one's my favorite.
We are having the most insane infuriating debate (of surely very little consequence) about whether or not to allow cottage courts for infill. NIMBY old neighborhoods are worried about inviting crazy partying college kids into their neighborhoods. I've been beating the drum about requiring cottage courts to have a playground in the middle - signal that it's family centered, there's an HOA to maintain it, and plus the families get to have a freaking playground in the middle of their cottage court green space. We desperately need affordable housing for families. I'm pretty sure cottage courts are going to get ditched altogether rather than include a goddamn playground. Yet every parent I talk to is like, "OMG YES. Please just include that."
Who can afford to use a bunch of cottages to fill a hole?
I think there's an unspoken "yes but the if not the college kids then poor families" subtext but everyone is hiding behind not wanting college kids.
OT: What's the best way to ask a guy if he's wearing a toupee? I'm at a holiday concert and the guy is another parent if that matters.
"That's not really your hair, is it?"
He slipped out before I could talk to him.
If you want to destroy his toupee, grab a strand as he walks away.
That would be great, but I'm wondering if he doesn't just have wonderfully thick hair.
You haven't lived until you've heard a kid choir sing a version of "Timber" with the lyrics changed to a G-rated ode to winter.
Next time wear a much worse one and start talking to him all understanding and winky.
We should have talked about hay while we had this thread.
