Stacks and Stacks, and a Found Photo

Last year at some point, a young woman from Bucks County's Pennsbury High School, for her senior project, collected 25,000 books (twenty-five thousand, yes) and donated them to the Trenton Public Library to sell at their book sale fundraisers. You may remember the fanfare that surrounded this generous donation, and certainly her charitable impulse and recognition of the importance of urban libraries should be celebrated. But think about this: 25,000 books. Imagine what that looks like, and how much it would take to sort through them. I don't have to imagine, because last weekend I went over to help do some sorting, and the piles and piles of boxes of books were daunting, and kind of depressing. And as I sorted through box after box--some full of books people may well want to buy, but many full of 30-year-old encyclopedias, out-of-date textbooks, etc.--and as mold and mildew filled my lungs, I thought: this is why we need eReaders. Because the fact is, a large number of those books--the moldy and damaged ones, of which there were many--are just going straight to the trash, where they probably should have gone in the first place. And many won't go to the trash at first, but will sit out at book sale after book sale until someone decides to give up and throw them away. And although I'm one of those old school readers who likes to feel the book in my hands, I could definitely see the argument for going electronic if it meant that someday no one would have to spend a Saturday in a basement trying to decide whether anyone would buy a 15-year-old Fodor's guide to Ireland.

On the other hand, if I hadn't been there sorting, I would never have found this photo, which fell out of one of the books.

This Rabbit Is Disappointed in You

My Name Is Karen, and I Am on Foursquare.

Like most of my friends, who are, in general, not terribly interested in the latest technological fads and social-networking shenanigans, I was not an immediate Foursquare convert. And, like most of my friends (at least those who even bother with Twitter), I was mostly just annoyed by all the check-ins and mayorship announcements cluttering up my Twitter feed. Do I want to track your every move as you spend your Saturday doing errands? Do I care that you have been to the local Red Lobster or Ladies' Workout Express more than anyone else on Foursquare? No. Why on earth would you even want me to know that?

But...thanks to one friend who is, unlike most of my friends, an early adopter and technophile, now I'm on Foursquare. And I love it. And, done right, it seems like pure marketing gold, at least when turned loose on suggestible types like me. In simple terms, it makes me want to go places more. All places, especially those I've been to before (so that, yes, I might someday be mayor), or those with Foursquare deals. I also admit that I like to scan the "who's here" list to see if I can identify other Foursquare players.

But because most of the people I go places with are not on the Foursquare bandwagon, and because I am old enough to believe that it's rude to whip out your mobile device while you're, say, at dinner with someone, I am actually a closet Foursquarer, checking in discretely when my companion is in the rest room or otherwise distracted. I confess that I have actually checked into a couple of venues when I was in the rest room myself, which really makes it feel dirty. My Foursquare behavior is ridiculously similar to that of a closet alcoholic secretly pulling sips of Jack Daniels from a flask in her purse. So yes, I'm keeping my Foursquare participation on the DL, but the good news for you is that in keeping with this you will not see updates on Twitter every time I check in somewhere or become the mayor of something. But just fyi, I'm the mayor of Villa Park (just the actual park, not the neighborhood), which I hope comes with some authority to get the kids to clean up after themselves a little better, and maybe to help referee the soccer games on the tennis courts.

Family Fun Time

Last month I was out in South Dakota for a family reunion. My mother's very large family is from the eastern part of SD, and most of that side of my family is still out in that general area, with some farther-flung exceptions in Utah and Oregon. We try to do these reunions every few years, and this was the first year that the planning fell to my generation instead of my parents'. The task was originally assigned to my oldest cousin, but as he is an engineer and not a party planner, things were kind of falling through the cracks--so much so, in fact, that this reunion was actually supposed to have taken place last summer. Oops. Anyway, with some prodding from my aunts and some help from me and various others, cousin Bill managed to pull it off this year. The weekend was chosen to coincide with a Czechoslovakian festival in Tabor, SD, since we all have a bit of Czech blood in us. Not as much as this woman in the Czech Days parade, though.

I would totally vote for her, though, based on this alone.

This float features 2009's Czech Days prince and princess. I got the sense that the king was pretty much ready to give up his crown.

A fine time was had by all, as you can see by my aunts' and uncles' faces.

Bike Tour, Without the Tour

The 14th annual Trenton Bike Tour was yesterday, but this is as far as I got in terms of actually riding in it. This was partly because I realized only as I was putting the bike on the bike rack to head to the park that my tires were completely flat. But of course that was fixable, given the 200+ other riders plus the Knapp's Cycling folks who were there at the ride start--somewhere there would have been an air pump to use. The main reason was that I was helping my fellow TCR members in getting everyone registered and waivered, then going to get more fruit for the pit stop at Artworks (since there were so many more riders than we expected--woo hoo!), then setting up the pit stop. Here's a picture of everyone heading off on the second leg of the tour after the break.

It was also Artworks' Art Making Day, where people were invited to come and make art to sumbit for Art All Night on June 19-20. So while we were waiting for the riders we got to see the various art-making classes and activities in progress, which was also very cool--they also seemed to be getting a great turnout. And if you haven't yet seen the Ellarslie Open, which has works at both Ellarslie (the Trenton City Museum) and Artworks, I recommend you go. The works are amazing, as are both of the spaces that house them.

More Good Than Bad

So like most everyone else I know (though possibly not like most of the paltry 20-something percent of registered voters who bothered to vote last Tuesday), I'm disappointed about the election results. It's not as bad as I feared, but it's not as good as I'd hoped by a long shot. We'll see how the runoff goes, but at this point I'm hard-pressed to even say what the best case scenario is in most of those races. There are many more qualified and well-informed than I, however, who can help you out there. (See: Trenton blogroll -->)

To try to manage my general frustration, I've been playing a simple little game with myself as I walk or bike or drive around the city. There's plenty bad to note. Tonight, for example, as I was walking my dog, I encountered a woman getting out of her car, which she had parked on the diagonal (like in those old fashioned midwestern towns where backing up right into the street to get out of a parking space seems like a perfectly fine idea), in front of a fire hydrant. This in itself, of course, is barely worth noting. I'm at the point now where if you're "parked" in the middle of the street, so that traffic can maybe only just barely get around you, if at all, despite several perfectly fine parking spaces within spitting distance of your car, I'm only really pissed off if you don't at least have your hazard lights on. But this incident was pushed into the negative because the woman let out a ridiculous shriek when she saw me and my dog approaching, and when I said, trying to be kind, keeping the dog close to me, "she won't hurt you," she sucked her teeth in some combination of fear and annoyance, shouted "I'm terrified of dogs," and ran up onto her friend's porch where she cowered behind a lawn chair. Now people, I know the point of phobias is that they're irrational, but this is my dog:

It's hard to imagine that you could have been so traumatized by dogs in general that the sight of her, on a leash, trotting happily toward you would lead to screams of fright, but there you have it. It's not a big thing. I really don't begrudge her her fear of dogs. My problem was really only with the out-of-all-proportion magnitude of her reaction. So it made me feel a little sour as Francine and I continued around the block. At least I managed not to say "are you also terrified of parallel parking?" because that would have been rude.

So there are the bad things, yes. Crazy parking, trash blowing around, bricks inexplicably missing from the walkway around the veterans' memorial, and also, oddly, holes dug haphazardly in the dirt around the park--like there are huge dogs looking for bones. I can't figure out what that's about. But then there are also the good things. Kids playing Red-Light-Green-Light. A dad and his maybe-2-year-old daughter trying to sneak up on birds, the daughter squealing delightedly every time they fly away before she can catch them. The dogs I know were once strays who are now being walked by the generous folks who took them in. Etc. I'm not trying to get all sappy or anything. It's just that in order to keep myself from despairing too much about being trapped by a crappy real estate market in a city that seems ever further away from the Renaissance we all keep hoping for, I need to keep a scorecard. And as long as, on average, per walk, or drive, or bike ride, there is more in the good column than the bad, I can keep hanging in there. So far so good.

Happy Spring

One of my friends, who has a fairly common name, periodically gets email that was meant for someone else. Yesterday he got an email with no message, just a bunch of pictures attached, and this, oh happy day, was one of them.

I'm not sure what the Elks were up to that involved this guy having to wear a red plastic pig on his head, but I have decided that somehow the appearance of this picture in my life is a good sign.

How About This?

It is, it seems clear, pointless to hope that the glut of mayoral candidates in Trenton will winnow itself down to a reasonable number *and* still contain someone capable both of being elected and of effecting some positive change on the city. I'm no political scientist, but it seems unlikely that those who have already thrown their hat into this ring, or who will soon, are likely to look around at any point and say, "hey, you know, that guy/gal could probably do a pretty good job here, and I'm splitting the vote in such a way that it's impossible for either of us to win the election, so let me just step down." I mean, it's possible, but egos being what they are, it seems like a long shot. And I know there's the whole run-off strategy--if no one gets 50 percent of the vote then there's a run-off between the top two candidates. But to me it seems cynical to hope that the city will be so divided among the dizzying array of options that we have to force a simple majority in a run-off election--an election, incidentally, in which voter interest will likely be much lower than in the regular election. And it's not like we usually have a huge turnout to begin with.

But I have a dream, and it goes a little something like this. Maybe the various civic and community groups in the city could behave more rationally. Maybe they could all band together with one primary goal for the next few months: to thoughtfully and objectively interrogate all the candidates, determine the one who's best for Trenton--taking both electability and leadership potential into consideration--and support the living daylights out of him or her. Or maybe all we need is one group, with a strong and energetic membership, to take this on. The TCCA? Beautiful Trenton? Others? I know these groups were not created with such an overtly political purpose, so maybe we actually need a new group with this specific goal. But it sure would be helpful if there were already an infrastructure in place to get this started. Is that nuts? Am I being naïve? I just want to be able to do *something* for crying out loud. And knocking on doors all by myself seems a little lame.