One Set of Ecological Footprints in the Sand

For my Sustainable Development class I calculated my "Ecological Footprint" according to a questionnaire on a website maintained by the organization Redefining Progress. The questionnaire covered my eating habits, the size of my home, and modes of transportation, among other topics.

The results are returned in the number of acres of biologically productive land that it takes to maintain my bad self. Overall, I require 22 such acres. The average for the U.S. is 24 acres. Worldwide, there exist only 4.5 such acres per person.

Here's the breakdown by type of resource used:

Food: 5.9 acres
Mobility: 1.7
Shelter: 6.7
Goods / Services: 7.7
TOTAL: 22 acres

One of the questions was about how many hours per year I spend flying. There were five possible answers: 100 hours, 25 hours, 10 hours, 3 hours, and 0 hours. I answered 25 hours. I had a vague idea that air travel is incredibly resource-intensive, so I redid the quiz, and this time reduced my air travel to 10 hours to see how much of a difference it would make.

Results:

Food: 5.9 acres
Mobility: 0.7
Shelter: 6.7
Goods / Services: 6.7
TOTAL: 20 acres

By spending just 15 fewer hours in the air, I would reduce my mobility acreage and my goods and services acreage by one acre each.

I also did a Carbon Footprint calculator at another website sponsored by a British organization. This calculator measures how much carbon dioxide I spew into the atmosphere with a questionnaire based on home energy use and modes of transportation.

The results: I personally belch 19,801 kg of CO₂ into the sky each year.

On the one hand, I live in a city and drive less than 25 miles a week on average. On the other hand, our apartment is in a draughty old house that could use some good weatherstripping. And, once again, there's the air travel.

By far the largest contributor to my carbon footprint was air travel, which added 9,000 kg of CO₂, or 45% of my total carbon footprint. Right now I don’t have to travel for business, but even the three to five vacation trips I take per year emit a huge amount of CO₂.

Getting Out the Vote

Generally, I take Election Day off to do Get Out the Vote (GOTV) stuff. In the past, I've done door to door canvassing and always wondered if it was worthwhile, compared with other methods, such as phone banks.

According to Get out the Vote!, a study of GOTV efforts between 1998 and 2002, door-to-door yields 1 additional vote for every 14 people contacted, while phone banks average 1 additional vote for every 35 people contacted.

In 2004 I and a friend did targeted door-to-door in a semi-rural area of New Hampshire. This meant visiting a pre-determined list of identified voters, not simply going up and down a street knocking on every door. I estimate we actually talked to 8 people per hour, or four per hour per canvasser.

Four contacts per hour -- that's a pretty low contact rate, especially compared with phone. The phone canvass looks like it might be more efficient, even though the vote-per-contact yield is over twice as low.

Specifics on the Senate

Dem Pickups:
Montana: Tester
Ohio: Brown
Pennsylvania: Casey
Tennessee: Ford

Dem Holds:
New Jersey: Menendez

Republican Holds:
Virginia: Allen
Missouri: Talent
Rhode Island: Chafee

Election Prediction

Democrats need to pick up 15 House seats to gain majority. I say they'll get 12.

Democrats need to pick up 6 Senate seets to gain majority. I say they'll get 4.

Mispronunciations

Regarding George "It Rhymes With Darkly" Berkeley, "Alex" writes,

I am starting a list of names that are mispronounced and I wonder at what point that will fade from oral history. For example, the VP of the CSA was Alexander Stephens but pronounced "Steffens". Or Florida had a Senator named James Talliferro, but pronounced Tolliver. Any others?

Yep...Gnarls Berkeley is how I like to think of him. A few years ago a guy walked up to me and asked me, in a British accent, how to get to the Chandler Hotel "on Barkley Street." After a couple seconds of confusion, I pointed him in the direction of Berkeley Street.

According to Wikipedia, Berkeley, California is named for the Bishop.

As for your list, how about Mark Teixiera of the Texas Rangers? Not that it's mispronounced, but that I don't think the average American would know how to pronounce it by looking at it. And maybe we Americans are mispronouncing it as "Teshera," anyway.

And Alexander Cockburn, columnist for The Nation. In the Spring of 1989, I applied for a summer job at The Nation. Despite the fact that I addressed my cover letter to Ms. Micah Sifry (because I had never seen or heard of the Hebrew name Micah before and wrongly assumed it was a woman), Mister Sifry called me for a phone interview, during which I said that I enjoyed reading the columns of Alexander Cockburn, pronouncing all the letters as written. Only later did I discover that his name is pronounced Coe-burn, just like that awesome actor James Coburn. I didn't get the job.

I don't know of a specific one, but there's got to be a Beauchamp ("Beecham") out there somewhere whose name is routinely mispronounced. And how about a Leicester?

In Connecticut it is "Grenitch." In Rhode Island I believe they say East Green-which.

In Minneapolis, we often drove along Nicollet Ave., pronouncing that last "T" like our lives depended on it. Same with the final "N" on Hennepin Ave.

I think the very first McDonald's Restaurant was in Des Plaines, Illinois. That's "Dez Planes," thank you very much.

And how about 50 Cent? If you don't say "Fitty," it's like there's a giant neon sign above you saying: Bonehead. Bonehead. Bonehead.

George Berkeley's Epistemology

I'm taking a "Classics of American Thought" class. So far we've read John Winthrop on why economic and social inequality is actually pleasing to God, and John Locke on the basis for property rights and his epistemology, particularly the difference between primary (shape, size, solidity, number, and motion) and secondary (color, taste, smell, sound, and texture) qualities of objects.

This week is George Berkeley who sets out, in "Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous," (1713) to oppose Sceptics and Athiests by, in the first dialogue, adopting the Sceptics' point of view, namely that it is impossible to definitively prove the existence of objects. It's impossible because, as I understand it, we are slaves to our perceptions and to our experiences, so that everything we think we perceive is actually the production, in our mind's eye, of an archetype. For example, our eyes perceive a round, red, shiny thing with a little brown protruberance at the top. The particular combination of these shapes and colors is compared with a set of archetypes stored in our memory, resulting in the idea of an "apple" to form in our minds. We then proceed as if the apple exists.

Basically, as he presents the Sceptical point of view, Berkeley is saying that it's impossible to escape from our perceptions. We can't be certain that our perceptions are real -- after all, we perceive things in dreams but that doesn't make them real -- so we are left with doubt as to the nature of reality.

I follow the scepticism argument with respect to the sensory perceptions like color and sound, but things like shape, size, and motion are a bit more difficult for me. Can't we use a yardstick to measure the size of something? Or a yardstick and a stopwatch to measure its speed? I guess Berkeley is saying that we have to perceive in order to make those measurements, so we're back where we started.

What about pure intellectual ideas, like that of a circle? According to Berkeley's treatment of Scepticism, one cannot conceive of a circle without giving it some secondary qualities, such as, "Is it filled in or an outline?" If filled in, what color is it? If an outline, how thick is the line? Etc.

But what if I conceive of a circle as the set of points in a plane a units from a specified center point? I suppose Berkeley would say that I'm simply using other archetypes and symbols.

Where all this is going remains to be seen. Now I'll read an exchange of letters between Berkeley and Samuel Johnson.

Serge Gainsbourg

Today I was at Java Jo's and they were playing an album of French pop music that I hadn't heard before but really liked. One of the songs was about Bonnie and Clyde. I went home to itunes and determined that the artist was Serge Gainsbourg. His bio on itunes made him out to be quite the character.

The weather here is sparkling -- only a few more weeks before a mammoth gray nimbus cloud descends on Boston for five straight months.

Lucky duck

So I was watching a bit of Israel-Hezbollah coverage tonight and it sorta struck me: I really have no idea what it's like to be in a situation where I felt so strongly about something that I would decide that the only possible course was to take up arms and be willing to die, or more importantly, to kill, for that something.

I try not to take for granted how incredibly fortunate I am to have been born a white male in the United States in 1968. About the worst I can say about my fortune is that the U.S. economy started to be just so-so in about 1973. The postwar boom ended that year, growth slowed, inequality increased, and the marginal gains from increased productivity have shifted to capital from labor. So as a wage-earner it's been an 8 or a 9 instead of a 10, like it was for my parents' generation. But I have never wondered where my next meal was coming from, never worried that a militia was going to ethnically cleanse my neighborhood, and, apart from a general anxiety about nuclear war, never worried that my house might be hit by a rocket or a bomb.

Deeply disappointed...

...to attend a baseball game at the Great American Ball Park, hosted by the Cincinnati Reds, the so-called "Royalty of Baseball," the oldest team in major league baseball, established in 1869, that's four years after the end of the Civil War, the first team to host a night game under the lights, and be subjected to the same slew of asinine between-inning "promotions" and contests, not to mention the pre-game cheerleaders...
...and the made-up "mascot" Gapper that you might find at a Tampa Bay Devil Rays "game." Even the hydrocephalic yet strangely magnetic Mr. Red...

...was relegated to driving an ATV around the warning track in the pre-game gloaming. The fact that we visited the excellent Cinti Reds Hall of Fame and Museum before the game made the actual game experience all the more poignant.

Nice enough park, though, but as a replacement for a riverside concrete doughnut, nothing can compare with Pittsburgh's PNC Park, where we saw a Pirates-Brewers pitching duel in July 2001. Too bad the Pirates should be relegated, European soccer-league style, to the minor leagues, along with my boyhood idols the Kansas City Royals. (Calls to mind the time that I watched, alone, in my Hutchinson, Kansas basement, Chris Chambliss end the Royals' inspired 1976 playoff run with a toilet-paper festooned walk-off home run in Yankee Stadium.)

Book Nook

The Stand, Stephen King
This was the 1100-page "expanded edition" published in 1990, 12 years after the original version came out. In this post-apocalyptic tale, inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, a bioweapon virus escapes from a military installation in California and kills 99.4% of the world's population within two weeks. The story focuses on about 20 of the "immunes" as they slowly polarize into two camps, Good and Evil. As a fan of post-apocalyptic scenarios, I enjoyed King's imaginings of how the authorities would respond to a fast-moving, unstoppable, and lethal virus, and then how, after the authorities had been wiped out, how the few thousand survivors who remained would organize themselves. Also: richly detailed characters and spot-on, often hilarious, dialogue. I finished this book in about three days, basically reading non-stop.

Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins & Hunter Lovins
Lots and lots of examples of how manufacturing, transportation, construction, and urban planning can be done more efficiently and more profitably by learning to mimic nature's automatic recycling processes. A key insight is to reorient business toward providing services, rather than manufacturing and selling products. The photocopier industry already operates like this. Another example: instead of manufacturing and selling big rolls of carpet that have to be ripped up and landfilled when it gets stained and worn out, Interface Corp. sells "floor covering services," using individual carpet squares that can be pulled up and replaced as needed. Since the customer is paying for the floor covering service rather than for the carpet, Interface has an incentive to produce long-lasting carpet. Not only that, Interface completely recycles the old carpet into new carpet. This book made me want to learn more about the pros and cons of tradable polution credits as an alternative to regulation as a means getting polluters--both businesses and consumers--to properly account for the damage they cause to our air, water, and soil.

It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks
A sober, scholarly look at an old question: Why no Socialism in the U.S.? Lipset and Marks identify several factors, including the lack of a feudal heritage, the two-party duopoly, the refusal of the Socialist Party to work with organized labor, particularly the AFL craft labor unions in the early part of the 20th century, a high degree of ideological orthodoxy which turned off the great mass of Catholic white ethnic immigrants, a refusal to organize among African-Americans, and a rigid sectarianism which prevented a coalition with FDR's Democratic Party. (Even the Communists, as part of the "popular front" strategy, joined the New Deal coalition, but the Socialists refused to make any such compromises.) Overall, the Socialists come off as a sectarian, educated clique more concerned with ideological purity and hostility to "reformism" than with gaining power, and it is little wonder that they failed as a political party. I see some of the same dynamics in the American left today.

Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
A first-person account of Orwell's service on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. Fascinating description of the sectarian struggles among the various Marxist and Communist factions. The infighting on the Republican side probably contributed to their defeat. As in America during the New Deal, the Communists here are the pragmatic ones, trying to support the bourgeois Republicans against the Fascists while at the same time fighting the hard-line Marxists on the Communists' left who wanted an immediate workers' revolution in Spain. One reason the USSR didn't want a revolution in Spain is because it didn't want to upset its bourgeois ally France.

The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
In 1937, a Socialist book club in the UK sent George Orwell north to coal mining country to document the condition of the unemployed worker. In the first part of this book, Orwell paints a gripping but unsentimental picture of a coal-miner's life: 12 hours a day, six days a week, shoveling coal while on his knees because the ceiling is only 4 feet high and prone to cave-in. In the second part of the book, Orwell tears into the smug complacency of his fellow middle-class Socialists for whom Socialism is little more than a fashion. He doesn't believe, if push came to shove and Socialism really did come, that these armchair theorists would actually give up the class privileges that they enjoy.

Back to Boston

We dropped off our rented bikes at Rainbow Cycle, climbed into Helen's rented Opel and drove through the Burren for a last look at the Cliffs of Moher before heading back to Shannon Airport and our Aer Lingus flight back to Boston.

Two Days to Galway

It took two full days of steady cycling to get from Westport to Galway. This is primarily due to the fact that Greg is always one to go the extra 12 miles when planning a route. Why go the direct route when there are more circuitous routes? Why indeed?

We overnighted at a youth hostel in Cong and pedaled the final, triumphant miles into Galway in a driving rain. Helen met us at a hotel in Eyre Square. We toweled off and made for McDonagh's Seafood and the greatest fish and chips in the world.

One Night in Westport

After a few days in Ireland, I must admit that the "Cosy Irish Pub with the Peat Fire" scene can wear a bit thin. Sure, on our first night in Doolin we went to Gus O'Connor's Pub and were invited to drink cider out of a Gaelic Football trophy, but otherwise our pub experiences had been on the dry and boring side. Not that a small town Irish pub is the place to go when you're looking for a rip-roaring good time -- they're supposed to be kind of quiet and living-roomy, owing to their original function as sort of a communal living room. In general, the pubs we happened to visit seemed to cater mostly to pensioners and tourists from America, which got old.

Westport struck us right away as livelier than the other places we'd been -- no surprise, since it is the largest town we've been to for any length of time. Greg and I decided to go to a non-pub bar-type establishment that was hosting a local classic rock cover band, "Jagged Rocks" or "Jagged Stones" or something like that. The place was full of Irish locals our own age and the band was pretty darn good. Although it wasn't traditional Ireland, it was probably the most accurately Irish place we visited.

Clifden to Westport

Last evening in Clifden, after our quick spin around the Sky Road west of town, we made ourselves some spaghetti in the hostel kitchen. Joining us in the dining area / lounge were a half-dozen members of a mild-mannered Dutch motorcycle club who were making a moto-trip through Ireland. (Nothing like those Danish motorcycle gangs, who have been known to employ rocket launchers in their feuds with other gangs.) Greg and I privately dubbed this group "Motosauce Hollandaise."

We also went across the street to Mannion's Pub and attempted to play pool on the tiny little snooker table they had there, with the tiny little yellow and red balls, sans numbers. I wish I knew the rules of snooker. A very brightly-lit place. At about 9:30 some musicians came in, but it was clear that they would be amplifying their performance so we skedaddled back home and went to bed. Greg later reported that he could hear some amplified off-key crooning wafting across the street and into our hostel dorm room. I was apparently asleep during this time.

This morning we decided to abandon the protein-rich Full Irish Breakfast (sausage, bacon, eggs, and baked beans) that we had been eating on a daily basis, opting instead for carbohydrates in the form of danishes for Greg and bread and Nutella for me. I didn't notice a big difference in energy level during our ride today, but Greg said the new breakfast made a big difference for him. But then again I have substantial fat stores on which to draw during vigorous exercise, while Greg has 3% body fat and therefore must either burn what he eats or else he burns his muscles. So nutrition is a bigger issue for him than me.

Today's ride from Clifden to Westport was probably tops in terms of scenic beauty and remoteness. The weather was off and on misty, but we avoided a complete drenching. Our route took us from Clifden to Letterfrack, then off the main road to Tully Cross, past Lough Fee and then the Killary Fjord (Ireland's only fjord) to Lenane (site of filming for the 1989 film "The Field"), thence up the road a piece to Aasleigh Falls and back around the northern side of Killary Fjord for a few kilometers. The road turned north at this point toward Delphi; just past here, at the foot of Doo Lough (Dark Lake), we turned right onto a narrow paved path, barely 12 feet wide. This route took us up through a remote, high-walled valley with a steep climb over a ridge before we zoomed down into Drummin, Liscarney, and and finally Westport, a lively County Mayo city where we'll spend the night tonight at the Old Mill Hostel.

Motorcoach to Clifden

Today we decided to dash north and west to Galway, the 'capital' of the Connemara region via bus. That will give us more time to explore this region and get back to Galway on Sunday to meet up with Helen. We took a bus from Kinvara up to Galway and then transferred buses, taking one west to Clifden, on the Coast.

Enjoyed a short but sunny afternoon spin on the Sky Road around a high peninsula west of Clifden. Electric green grass, blue ocean, grey rock walls, brown heather. Tonight we'll stay at the local hostel and try to check out some more music while we plan our route back east through the Connemara region to Galway. We may stay here another night and do a day circuit here locally and then head straight back East to Galway. Or, we might leave and take a big swing north toward County Mayo before returning to Galway.

A Burren Scramble

Much better weather today. We left most of our gear at Fallon's and headed back to the southwest to criss-cross The Burren, a stark, empty region of exposed karst. About noon, stopped at the Burren Perfumery, a small fragrance workshop selling perfumes and soaps for what seemed like an awful lot. The nice ladies there did turn on the slide show for Greg and me. Lovely photos of The Burren landscape and its attendant flora. Greg and I supplemented the presentation with a shadow puppet featurette. Plot outline as follows: Dog chases Rabbit across the Burren. Duck walks around the Burren on his own. Tyrannosaurus Rex chases Dog back the other direction across the Burren. The End.

The weather was cloudy but bright in the morning, mostly sunny after 2 pm. We stopped at Poulnamone Dolmen, a 5800-year old tomb marker that is featured in the hand-drawn logo of The Burren pub in Somerville, Massachusetts. A great afternoon of chugging up and whizzing down little country lanes with rocky karst highlands all around.

In the evening we heard an accordion-piano-fiddle trio at Connor's Pub in Kinvara. Not one square inch of wall or ceiling space at Connor's was free of some sort of memorabilia item.

Doolin to Kinvara

Cool and rainy all day. We swung north out of Doolin, hugging the coast around Black Head and stopped at Glenaigh Castle on the southern shore of Galway Bay. Then the wind-driven rain in our faces began, continuing all the way through Ballyvaughan and Bellharbour, where we turned south to visit the Cloncamore Abbey before jumping over a little ridge and then pedaling our soaked selves into Kinvara. Checked in to Fallon's B&B, had an early dinner at the pub across the street, and later on played darts at the Ould Plaid Shawl, which is the birthplace of Mr. Fahy, an Irish writer and supporter of the resistance against the British.

Boston to Shannon to Ennis to Doolin

My brother Greg and I flew overnight from Boston to Shannon Ireland, arriving at 8 am, just as the sun was coming up. We took a bus to Ennis, the principal city of County Clare, and rented a couple of bikes from Tierney's on Abbey St. Noel Tierney was kind enough to "pint out" the best route to Doolin, on the West Coast just north of the Cliffs of Moher (a.k.a. the Cliffs of Mohair).

The bikes are servicable, by which I mean that they are able to be serviced -- by Greg, to his mild consternation. Just north of Ennis my chain slipped off the front crank; Greg adjusted the derailleur and we were on our way. We cycled west through Inagh, Ennistymon, Lahinch, Liscannor and then turned north towards Doolin, making a brief stop at a windswept Cliffs of Moher. After a short coast into Doolin we checked in at Paddy's Hostel and then walked over to Gus O'Connor's Pub.


A local Gaelic Football club (15 players to a side) was celebrating their first championship in 60 years. They won the tournament yesterday; this was day two of the celebration process. Just after we arrived a guitar player and a flute player arrived. The football players sang along with just about every song with gusto. After an hour or so one of the footballers walked around with the league trophy, a silver jug filled with Bulmer's cider. We all had a swig from the trophy.

After a sleepless night on the plane, and after a Guinness, a Murphy's, a Bulmer's, and a Carlsberg at Gus O'Connor's, the sandman beckoned so we shuffled back up the street to the hostel and fell asleep. In our dorm room with us was another cyclist, Basil from Switzerland.

This morning, after another bike maintenance session, we had breakfast in Doolin and will now set out across The Burren. Our goal for today is Kinvara, which is south of Galway.

Brookhaven to Grainfield via Jackson, Chicago, Boston, and Denver

On Wednesday afternoon, my Red Cross assignment came to an end. I left the logistics duties at the Red Cross shelter at the Brookhaven, Miss. First Baptist Church in the capable hands of my replacement, a young man from Meriden, Connecticut, and caught a shuttle bus to Jackson, one hour to the north. Stayed there Wednesday night and then flew to Boston via Chicago on Thursday.

Now I'm back at home for half a day before Helen and I head out to my mom's house in Grainfield, Kansas for a visit featuring a 25th-anniversary party for my aunt and uncle Carol and Jim Hartman.

Love Bugs and an Update from Brookhaven

Helen came down to Mississippi for a short visit to Vicksburg over the weekend. "What is the deal with all these bugs?" was one of her first questions. The one-hour drive south from the Jackson, Miss. airport to Brookhaven had left her windshield completely covered with the remains of thousands of love bugs.

The Mississippi love bug (Plecia nearctica) is currently in its two-week fall heyday, spattering windshields and fouling radiators from Natchez to Meridian. These insects pair up for some good airborne lovin' during which they hover drowsily around at ear- and windshield- level. The locals say that this year's crop is especially populous.

My stay here in Brookhaven at the Red Cross shelter at the First Baptist Church is winding up in a couple of days. The next wave of Red Cross volunteers is arriving, and over the next couple of days I'll be training my replacement.

Overall, my experience here has been a good one. The magnitude of the disaster has stretched the Red Cross very thin and the fact that most of us here in Brookhaven are first-time volunteers has been challenging. In addition, the Red Cross decided to forego the damage-verification procedures that it normally follows before distributing monetary assistance. This led to long lines and accusations of double-dipping and fraudulent damage claims at our local service center here in Brookhaven. After some improvisation and trial and error, the Red Cross came up with a dated ticket system that alleviated the long lines and uncertainty.

Local columnist Bill Jacobs does an excellent job of describing the situation of last week. Here's his piece in full from the Brookhaven Daily Leader:

We received a call Monday morning that the Lincoln County Multi-Purpose Building on Belt Line Road was being overwhelmed with people seeking Red Cross assistance. Grabbing a camera to lend a hand to our news staff, I headed out to shoot a photo, never expecting what I saw - thousands of people standing in the mid-morning heat - waiting.

Cars and people were everywhere.

A line, three to four people wide, snaked twice the length of the facility's parking lot. At the door of the building, armed National Guardsmen stood guard holding the crowds back as another guardsman pleaded with people to back away from the door and requested that only one member per family enter the facility.

While everyone was orderly and tempers seemed in check Monday morning, as the week wore on the situation became more intense as an estimated 6,000 people at one point waited. In the wee hours of Wednesday, the situation became more intense and additional National Guardsmen were ordered onto the facility grounds.

Rumors began flying, and the calls into our newsroom became intense. The calls varied in theme and frustration. Some wanted to know how to avoid the long lines; others were about rumors of "free money" being given out. And still others were frustrated that national volunteers had replaced local Red Cross officials. The most chilling were a few frustrated comments about never again donating money to the American Red Cross!

As a reservation system was put into place the pressure was relieved significantly by Thursday and a potentially volatile situation was avoided.

At a meeting with the Red Cross late Thursday afternoon, many of the rumors were addressed and explanations given for the events of the week. The bottom line, according to Tim Connolly, Red Cross relief coordinator, is that size and scope of Hurricane Katrina completely overwhelmed the Red Cross system and that despite usual efforts to prevent abuse, their focus became to get money to as many families as possible as quickly as possible.

Connolly admitted that the policy opened the system for abuse and admitted abuse was going on. However, he said systems were in place to later identify that abuse and suspect names would be turned over to local law enforcement authorities.

National volunteers replaced local Red Cross officials, Connolly said, as a matter of policy to assure the credibility of the system. He said that having volunteers without local ties registering and handing out checks would assure everyone that no favoritism could be shown. "We do not care who you are related to or what connections you have; we want to treat everyone fairly," he said.

The "free money" he said was a matter of personal moral attitude and hoped people would let those who have lost everything get what they need first. He chided those who maybe lost a freezer full of food but were standing in front of people who only had the clothes on their back.

To those who expressed reluctance to donate to the Red Cross, he just responded, "What good will that do? The purpose of the Red Cross is to help."

To avoid the long wait, Connolly suggested people use the national toll-free line, 1-800-975-7585. Unfortunately, that line also produces a long wait, as most attempts result in a busy signal. Connolly said the Red Cross was trying to solve the problem but added that sitting by a phone was more comfortable than standing in a long line in the dust and heat.

All in all, by Friday morning, more than 5,000 individuals had been processed and 15,000 more had appointments reaching into mid-October. The Red Cross estimates that at current levels more $20 million will be distributed by the Lincoln County relief center.

Now with Giggleastic Waistband!

Well, the 6 ERVs that were operating around here left for Gulfport and Biloxi last night, so No ERV for you! this time. No problem. Today I went and worked by myself in the warehouse and it was awesome. I had been going a bit stir crazy at the shelter now that the excitement of the getting things set up during that first week had died down. Although I have become more extroverted lately, at the end of the day I really do prefer working with inanimate and/or abstract objects so a day out of the shelter was just what the doctor ordered.

For my boonwork in the warehouse I spent about 9 hours going through the mountains of boxes of STUFF that people from all over the world have sent down here. In particular, I focused on diapers. I can now tell you everything you ever wanted to know about diapers from newborn on up to end-of-life. It seems that there are six basic sizes and then you get into "pull-ups"or training pants, some of which have little pictures that disappear once they get wet -- apparently the message to little Bobby or Sally is: "Go potty correctly or your favorite cartoon characters will desert you!" I like it. Kids...need...consequences.

Hotter Than A Pepper Sprout

Chris reports he is doing well. Supply shipments and relative stability seem finally to be coming to the Brookhaven shelter.

Since there are other places still in need of urgent help, Chris is hoping he'll soon be able to go out in of the Red Cross's "ERV"s (Emergency Response Vehicles) into wider Lincoln County. He'd most likely be serving food to the hundreds of people who have to wait all day in a rodeo barn north of town to get assistance checks from the Red Cross. No FEMA presence as of yet.

The best news from my point of view is that Chris gets a 24-hour pass this weekend, so I'm going to Jackson (a la Johnny Cash) to visit him on Saturday. We're going to stay in Vicksburg, home of the world-famous civil war battlefield and "hand-patted" hamburgers.

If you've gone to Google maps recently, and looked up an address in New Orleans, you'll notice they have a new button that allows you to see satellite pictures of Katrina's effects. Chris says that people in the shelter were using it to check on the damage and were showing him where their houses were and pointing out the 17th St. Canal breach, the levee system, etc.

Posted by Helen

Makin' Progress

Good day today. The supply pipeline is finally filling up; national contracts with private suppliers are kicking in, and the Red Cross is now taking the logistics load off of these local churches that have been housing evacuees / huricanees across the Gulf Coast. It is difficult to tell exactly what caused the supply delays; the most likely reason is the sheer scope of the disaster. I will leave the critiques of the government response to others for now. It's difficult to judge I think because the scope is unprecedented, and last year I believe FEMA got high marks for its response in Florida.

Here's a calendar of my day today:

7:00 am: Shelter staff meeting to report on the previous night's 5-county meeting at the warehouse and to flag issues that will come up today.

8:00 am: Time to "redeploy" the cardboard boxes that the emergency cots came in. They had been piled in the hallway near the makeshift health clinic and the nurse wanted them outta there since this was also the waiting area for the clinic. Found a church volunteer to help me with that moving task and found out she was an unemployed kindergarten teacher who had recently moved to Brookhaven from Western Massachusetts.

9:00 am: I talk with the Sysco Food Service representative, to work out a way to drop-ship food directly to this shelter while billing the national Red Cross.

9:30 am: I tell N., a shelter resident from the Gulf Coast who has background in recreation and who has been leading children's activities on his own initiative, that the kindergarten teacher from Western Mass. was interested in coming in to work with the children as well.

10:30 am: A quick run to Wal-Mart to pick up items that are too specific or too timely to be supplied by the local Red Cross logistics base ("log base" for short, sounds cooler than "warehouse," which is what it is.) Tops on the shopping list today is disinfectant hand gel. We have some kids with colds and some with flu symptoms and so need to encourage hand cleanliness now to try to forestall a big problem later. I set up 5 "Clean Hands Stations" around the shelter, each one with a big pump bottle of Germ-X.

11:45 am: Since I have the keys to an SUV, sometimes I am pressed into taxi service. I take an older diabetic man with elevated blood sugar and bad eyesight from the shelter to the emergency room. He and his family are just passing through town and were concerned, so they stopped in at the shelter. The family follows in their car since they don't know the route. Most of them came in contact with flood water at their home in Louisiana, so they will all be getting tetanus shots at the ER as well. Wonderful family; the matriarch and patriarch bickered affectionately throughout.

1:15 pm: A call comes into the shelter from a local barber shop: "I have a relative who lives here in Brookhaven. He's a truck driver, stranded in Illinois by the fuel shortage, and he's going crazy hearing about the shortage of supplies back home. He has arranged to drive a truckload of diapers, infant formula, Neosporin, water, and clothes down to the Gulf and he wants to bring it to Brookhaven if he can." It's important to pounce on these offers because if a local log base doesn't respond right away, the truck driver will call another one, and keep calling until he finds a warehouse ready to receive his truck. So I call the local log base and give them the scoop.

3:30 pm: Meet with the food service manager here at the church to coordinate the supply of food with the menus that she is planning. One free item I can offer her is something called "Chicken Fritters," which we think are probably similar to chicken tenders. They have been donated in a frozen format by a local poultry processor and are sitting in a freezer trailer at the log base.

4:30 pm: The staff desperately needs MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) and water to give to random folks needing food who stop by the shelter on their way to somewhere else. I hear through the grapevine that some government entity is handing out MREs and water at the local softball diamond, so I send one of the dozens of church volunteers who are always on hand after them. The MREs are designed to somehow heat themselves up when you add a bit of water. I haven't tried one yet but I intend to.

5:30 pm: My first shipment from the local Red Cross log base arrives: toilet paper, two car seats, a wheelchair, blankets, crayons, trash bags, cleaning supplies, liquid hand soap, deodorant, a cube refrigerator to store drugs in the clinic, and other assorted odds and ends. Not everything I asked for but a good part of it. The log base doesn't do back orders, which is good, actually, because sometimes something I ordered from them will show up in the meantime from some other source. If I still need an item, I can just re-order it tonight.

6:00 pm: Quick check-in with the Red Cross health services guy who is traveling around from shelter to shelter supplying specialized medical supplies. He brought a bunch of stuff today: inhalers, insulin, lancets, syringes, disposable otoscope covers, Pedialite, sharps box, etc. The "clinic," which is in a room normally used for meetings of the church's Budget Committee, is now finally starting to look like a clinic.

6:30 pm: Dinner: Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, and cake.

7:00 pm: Begin preparing for the 5-county meeting tonight at the warehouse. I need to put together another order from the local Red Cross log base and also prepare a memo outlining the drop-ship arrangement I've made with Sysco.

8:00 pm: Five-county Red Cross meeting at the warehouse. This is where the Red Cross workers from the 5 county region we're in assemble to share information and ask questions of the log base staff. I give my logistics contact my order for today; we go over it and he tells me which things I should procure myself at retail, and which ones he can get to me from the warehouse or other wholesale sources. I take a walk around the warehouse to see what they have on hand, so I can inform the staff back at the shelter and see if they want any of it. There's quite a lot of food now, which I can pass along to the kitchen manager at the shelter. Even though we have this new drop-ship arrangement with Sysco, if we can get non-perishable food from the local log base, we should take advantage of it. I also find out that the Red Cross is turning away used clothing, at least in our area. The same thing has happened at the shelter -- local residents who want to donate clothes are now redirected to another local charity. As we leave, I'm happy to see that one of the two inbound trucks scheduled on the warehouse board is the truck from Illinois that I had handed off to the warehouse staff earlier today.

10:30: Back to the shelter at First Baptist and a chance to use the shower there.

11:00-12:00 Meaningless puttering around and some tomfoolery.

Logistics 101

I've been placed in charge of logistics for the shelter I'm at in Brookhaven. That means making sure there is enough food, water, medical supplies, clothing, and bedding for the 200 people staying here for what is now an indefinite period of time.

The church members here at the First Baptist Church are just incredible. They carried most of the logistical load for the 200 shelter residents during the first week after Katrina hit while the Red Cross geared up to supply this area. Now, slowly, I am able to take over more and more of the supply function, working directly with Sysco, the food distributor, and the local ad hoc Red Cross warehouse (or "log base") which is finally filling up with supplies. The head Red Cross guy at the log base is on leave from his permanent job with the United Nations. He has been all over the world doing logistics for relief operations: Sudan, SE Asia after the Tsunami, Bosnia, etc.

Needless to say, I'm learning a lot!

Brookhaven

I'm just now finishing up my first 24 hours at a Red Cross shelter in Brookhaven, MS, about 130 miles north of New Orleans on Interstate 55. Most if not all of the 200 people here are from New Orleans.

The shelter is housed by the First Baptist Church and is large and well-equipped. The congregation here is fully involved in preparing and serving food; in fact it is the congregation that has made this shelter work so far. They are experienced with sheltering during and after hurricanes and the kitchen here can produce 250 meals in one go.

The Red Cross is currently getting up to speed on logisitics, and today here at the shelter we, the Red Cross shelter staff, began making arrangements with a food distributor to get food delivered here for the foreseeable future. Until now, the congregation had been feeding the 200 "hurricanees" out of their own food supply, locally donated food, and by ordering food on their own.

The good news is that Brookhaven is dry and relatively up to speed as far as communications goes, although my cell phone service is only spotty and intermittent. It looks like I will be here for several days at least.

Waiting for Deployment

Report from the Gulf Coast:

Chris arrived in Montgomery, Alabama yesterday afternoon. He and 30 other volunteers on his flight were all picked up by the Red Cross and transported to a Holiday Inn Express, where they had a good dinner and a good night's sleep.

He has found a Virginian and two South Carolinians with whom he works well, and they are hoping to be kept together as a team. He was originally assigned a Nissan Sentra but acquired a more appropriate Jeep Grand Cherokee through a savvy trade with an SUV-hating volunteer.

He is now in the Red Cross headquarters (an abandoned K-Mart) waiting for deployment instructions which will most likely take him somewhere along the Mississippi or Alabama coast.

"Are you an experienced Red Cross volunteer?"
"No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

Posted by Helen

UPDATE: Chris just found out he will be deployed to a 200-person shelter in Brookhaven, Mississippi.

Lotso Leadville Photos...

...Have been posted to Ball of Dirt: Page 1 | Page 2

These are shots of the Leadville 100 Bike Race taken by me, Helen, and my cousin Raelene.

You can order prints of these photos by first clicking on the thumbnail of the photo, and then clicking on the "Add to Basket" button next to the photo you want to order.

Alabama Bound

In the next day or so I will be headed to Montgomery, Alabama with the Red Cross to help with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. It's possible that I could be on the scene there until Sept. 22. After that I'll be in Kansas visiting my mom for a week.

I joined the Red Cross as a disaster volunteer back on August 8, 2005, intending to be on-call one day a week to respond to house and apartment fires. As it turned out, Hurricane Katrina will be my first assignment. Since Tuesday of this week I've been getting some additional training and filling out a good deal of paperwork.

Helen has been aware of my preparations during the last few days but I wanted to wait until I got a definite assignment before I told anyone else. Having no experience in this area, I'm not sure I will have the time or facilities to do much emailing or blogging while I'm in Alabama, but if it works out I may post some updates to this blog.

War Profiteers

Need a break from Katrina coverage? Check out this new CEO pay study from my old friends at the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. As the International Herald Tribune reports, picking up a Boston Globe story:

"The chief executives of the U.S. defense industry's largest companies are taking home paychecks that have more than doubled in the past four years - far greater than the average 7 percent growth for all corporate CEOs, according to an independent study based on documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission."

Government Bureaucrats 2, Private Sector 0

A lot has happened on the Verizon front since we last placed a call to Verizon lawyer Lynne Anne Sousa, Esq., J.D., B.A., C.Y.A.

After I got off the phone with Sousa, I took a little walk. First I climbed over my back fence to get a better look at the pole. This involves scaling a stone wall and tottering on a rickety chain-link fence, which is why I hadn't done this before. Turns out that the "comically long and spindly pipe thing" was not a pipe at all -- it was an optical illusion. It was actually the cables coming from the pole and leading out to another pole on Orchard Hill Rd., which runs behind our house on Tower Street.

Our backyard neighbor, whose house sits on a ledge about 20 feet above the foundation of our place, had propped up the cables with a 2x4 so that they wouldn't drag on the ground. I had never met our backyard neighbor, so thought this would be a good opportunity to do so.

I rang the doorbell and an older woman answered.

I explained who I was and she called for her husband. A guy resembling a slimmed-down Tip O'Neill showed up. "Come on and have a seat," he said, motioning to his front stoop. He said his name was Frank C.

We sat down and had a great talk. Found out that a tree on his property fell on the cables back on August 14 -- that's what pulled the pole away from our house, which in turn ripped the cables and two clapboards off. He said he called Verizon immediately, and "the woman there couldn't have cared less. She said that they'd send someone out. I said, 'OK, whatever.' I've still got phone service at this point, after all."

"Right," I said. "We do too. Cable is fine as well. Apparently that makes it tougher to get quick action."

"Guess so. Anyway, last Friday, some old-timer showed up and said that someone had called the mayor."

"That was me," I said.

"Well, it worked, because this guy was all apologetic: 'I had no idea' et cetera. And then, later that day, a guy named Lucas came out with a crew and got rid of the branch that was hanging on the cables." I remembered the chain saws I heard last Friday. Score one for the Mayor's 24-Hour Help Line!

Government Bureaucrats 1, Private Sector 0.

"So did they say anything about righting the pole or repairing my house?"

"Nope," Frank said.

We got off onto other topics. Frank gave me the history of the street, how all the houses were built in the early 1930s and the older homeowners like him were dying off or moving away now. He said he was a union construction worker.

"You know, this trouble we're having with Verizon has a lot to do with outsourcing and deregulation," I said.

"Yep," Frank said. "The old New England Telephone would have been out here in a flash. I remember Boston Edison -- they would actually come out to replace a blown fuse." Wow, I thought. Maybe not the best example to use when reminiscing about the good old days of union jobs. But on the other hand, why shouldn't we expect that kind of service? Anyway...

"Right, and the utilities were tightly regulated," I said. "They made a steady profit but couldn't raise rates willy-nilly and they had far better service. This so-called 'construction crew' that Verizon has been promising me for two weeks is outsourced, most likely non-union."

"Scalliwags!" Frank said.

"Yeah! But these outsourced crews get paid probably next to nothing. Professionalism has to suffer."

"Yep, those utilities are terrible nowadays," Frank said. "They string their cables everywhere -- and they're all too low! They let their poles lean -- they just wait until they fall down to fix them." Frank was right. Earlier this year, in Newton, a suburb of Boston, a truck hit a low-slung NStar cable and pulled down six (6) utility poles, knocking out power to the whole neighborhood for days (Hat tip to Helen for pointing out a Boston Globe op-ed on this problem of hazardous low-hanging wires everywhere).

Just as we were really getting going on cursing out the utilities, it started to rain, so I clambered back over the fence and went back inside.

Waiting for me was a message from Marilyn Ryan from the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy. She got my email complaint and said that she called Verizon. I called her up, described the situation in more detail, and we had a good talk. We agreed that I would call her again on Tuesday to check in again.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning, about 10:30. A Comcast technician shows up in response to my call on Sunday. I figured that if I got Comcast on the case, that might put some pressure on Verizon to right the pole, since that would be a prerequisite to re-attaching the cables. The Comcast guy and I walk back around to the backyard, and (cue heavenly chorus) there are four guys in Verizon hardhats who are righting the pole!

The foreman-looking guy sees us and says, "Are you the guys who are here to fix the drops?" Apparently "drops" is the term for the cable connection to the house. The Comcast guy nods and before I could answer the foreman says, "Yeah, they need to be re-attached. The lady here in this house has complained."

It's all I can do to keep keep from laughing as I raise my coffee mug and say, "I'm the lady."

"Oh...You're the lady," the foreman said. The youngest guy on the Verizon crew, shoveling behind the foreman, thinks this is pretty funny.

I wait a moment, squint meaningfully at the hanging clapboards, and then walk over to the crew. "You guys want some coffee?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no, no, we're fine, thanks anyway," they all said.

"Okay," I say, before strolling back around to the front of the house.

Apparently, the call from the Mass. Department of Telecommunications and Energy did the trick. I can't say that's what it was for certain, but the call was made on Monday afternoon, and the Verizon crew showed up on Tuesday morning. It's the conclusion I'll draw.

So: Government Bureaucrats 2, Private Sector 0. The Private Sector should be glad I don't dock them a point for the Verizon foreman's "Some lady" comment but it turned out to be funny so I'll let it go.

An hour or so later, I hear the dulcet tones of workmen hammering on my house! Could it be -- they're repairing my clapboards? I dare not look lest it turn out to be a giant woodpecker...

But the suspense is killing me. I go to the back yard and, YES! The anchors are re-attached! The clapboards are expertly repaired! Galvanized nails even!

I race inside to check the dial tone. A bit of static...hmm. But, no problem. I call the Verizon repair robot and tell her about all about it. She's got a sympathetic robotic ear, and says someone will come look at it on Thursday, sometime between the hours of 8:00 am and 8:00 pm. Luckily, I'm getting my hair done on Friday, and my canasta club is on Wednesday, so Thursday will work out fine.

I hope this closes the book on this particular episode. Famous last words...