Then the Sun Came Out...! Waking Up to Imperviousness.

Annandale was brushed by the edge of Hurricane Lee, but the flooding, tree loss, and infrastructure and property impact was surprisingly high. The EPA has recently mandated that states reduce water volume to urban streams and waterways. Reducing impervious surfaces in the Big Picture - voting for state and county projects that use pervious paving for parking lots and roads, supporting research that seeks to advance impervious pavement ideas. In the Little Picture: handsome rain barrels and rain chains; rain gardens, mowing higher and not edging your lawn.

NOVA's Transfer Blog Zombie Brigadoon

 Like Brigadoon, that 1950s enchanted village that appears in an Scottish glen, once every hundred years,
 NOVA's Transfer Blog pops up for an encouraging paragraph once every 16 weeks. Different from green and busy Brigadoon, though, there is no happy dancing - no interaction at all.  On November 13, 2010, someone called "Sentinel", some hopeful, wide-eyed transfer student, stumbled upon this glowing little window of a  blog in that dark, lonely wilderness of a transfer-student's journey. Rushing to it, he  hammered on the door hoping for comaraderie and comfort inside, and typed:
"Hey I'm moving to Virginia for a new job, and am interested in attending NOVA. Do you have a database of accepted course transfer equivalencies, or should I just submit my transcripts and hope for the best?"
Did anyone answer? Who knows! You'd think there'd be plenty of comments. Plenty of answers. The road is crammed with people working toward two-year degrees, the glowing Oz of "Guaranteed Admission" at one of Virginia's fine four-year institutions drawing them ever forward! Bonking shoulders, slogging on, moaning things like: "Braaaiins"  ....but often:  "Hey, where is everybody?"
That's too bad. 

Running Austin: Progressive Urban Water Management

Our first conversation in Austin: "Uh....'rained around...July, didn't it? Yeah. It sprinkled in July. With the rationing, we've got the drip irrigation on the trees on Tuesday nights."

"Wow"

BYOB and Save the Planet

Bring Your Own Bowl: Save Green and Save the Planet


You Gonna Talk the Talk? Eat the Walk.

It's Tuesday at the office and it's time for lunch. You've got to get the MacIntire paper out by 3, write something clever about medieval aquaducts, you're not sure how to spell "medieval," and you've got to finish the Conics section in Math 164. Gak! Blood sugar plummeting. Damn MacIntire! Damn amazing innovation in ancient engineering! Damn parabolas!  So, you've run downstairs to the Deli, and you're back at the Mac swabbing unagi rolls in the wasabi-soy  swilling in the corners of your gaping styrofoam clam. In the monitor's blue glow you chew, happy now...mulling MacIntire, chuckling about latus rectum, but as you do, you know something's deeply wrong...Parasitic roundworms? No. It's something you can do something about!

Bring your own bowl, box, mug, jug, pot, plate, or jorrum to lunch, and ask the Deli to tare the weight. They'll be thrilled! They'll save up to 30 cents for every non-biodegradable styrofoam cup and box you don't buy (for a rather jarring markup, you know), and you'll save the Planet and all the unagis in it.

Plus, unless you're sitting in a '78 Skylark at 3 am staking out perps, eating just about anything troweled into closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam is fishy. And not the good kind.

BYOB

BYOB - Zero-ish Packaging

In the US, we throw away 1.4 billion pounds of trash, say the organizers of
 in.gredients, the first-ish (if you don't count the developing world) package-free grocery stores, basing their business model on "pre-cycling" and this:

• The US fills 63,000 25-ton garbage trucks every day; about 700,000 tons of garbage is placed in American landfills on a daily basis.
• Packaging makes up about 40 percent of that. The packaging we throw away, then, annually totals nearly 39 million tons of paper/paperboard, 13.7 million tons of plastics, and 10.9 million tons of glass.

Every day. That's 100 space shuttles. Every day.  Half that, 560 million pounds - 50 space shuttles -  isn't products purchased, but the wrappers that protect or advertise them. 560 million pounds of boxes, bins, buckets, sacks, bags, bottles, cups, and clams that, typically, we use only once.  On a global-scale, the numbers are mind-boggling. And quite scary. Not all packaging can be eliminated - you really don't want a handful of chicken thighs and a pint of frozen yogurt - but this simple strategy proposed by in.gredients will reduce waste tremendously!  :))) There is a better way!!!:)))

http://www.indiegogo.com/ingredients

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYkw7Jx6Xnw

Water Feature