But what I want to talk about, the thing that’s been really weighing me down, is the ice pile.

This is the ice pile.

It is exactly what it looks like: a whole city block’s worth of ice and snow, shoved onto our front lawn by the gas company.

See, the gas company is doing work in the area, replacing all the meters inside people’s homes (which are over 100 years old) with meters that will be on the outside. The sidewalks in the neighborhood are all torn up and there are big holes and piles of sand everywhere, and the days are spent enduring thrumming deep vibrations from the drilling, which moves our glassware and threatens to send bottles tumbling off the shelves in our bar. They have had temporary no parking signs on our block for almost a month. It’s a tremendous pain in the ass.

And then one day I came home from work and the entire street had been cleared of ice and snow, and all of that ice and snow had been deposited on my front lawn.

See, ours is the only house on the block that does not have a wrought-iron fence in front. When we bought the house, we viewed this as a positive thing: it seemed more open and friendly. But since we’ve moved in, we have realized that it’s actually a problem. Because ours is the only accessible lawn, it serves as the universal toilet for all neighborhood dogs, many of whose owners feel unencumbered by the social norms that dictate they should scoop their poop. Every day, the mailman trudges across our grass rather than walk on the paved path. On Halloween, ours is the house still getting doorbell rings at 10:30 pm from un-dressed-up teenagers, because we have no front gate to lock.

And apparently, our lack of fence is seen by the gas company as an open invitation to use a freaking bulldozer to shove all the ice and snow in the neighborhood (plus a healthy portion of sand and dirt and other grit) onto our (privately-owned) lawn. WHEN THERE IS A PERFECTLY SERVICEABLE CITY-OWNED GRASS PLOT ONLY THREE HOUSES DOWN AT THE CORNER.

Guys, I kind of lost it.

I said swear words. I sighed deeply. I went into the house and was about to start complaining about it to our nanny, and that’s when she let me know that she had to give me her two weeks’ notice because of the new job. I’m blaming the ice pile for our amazing nanny quitting.

The thing about the ice pile was not just that it was annoying, and felt awfully inconsiderate of the gas company. It’s that the ice pile represented a REALLY LOT OF ICE. Ice that is FROZEN WATER. Sitting 2 feet from our basement windows. Remember our basement? With which we have had a lot of flooding trouble? Which is finally dry, after much time and money and work?

Yeah, I was not all that pleased to have 12 cubic feet of frozen water sitting adjacent to my newly-dry basement.

So the next morning, I approached the gas crew as I walked out the door to head for the train.

“Hey guys,” I said in as rational a tone as I could muster. “I live in that green house there- the one with the ice pile in the front yard? We are sort of not delighted about that ice pile, because if it melted, it would definitely be enough water to flood our basement, and it’s supposed to get warm pretty soon, and no one actually asked us if it was okay to put the ice and snow there in the first place….so when do you guys think you’re going to move that?”

“Uh…..” they said, looking at each other blankly. Then, one of them said “we’ll definitely move it when we’re done.”

Done? With what, exactly? With fixing all of the 100+ year old gas pipes in the area? As in, many moons from now? Hm.

But I was also pretty sure that these guys were not actually in charge of the ice pile, so I just sighed and walked to work.

Several days later, the ice pile was still in our yard, and my blood pressure elevated every time I saw it.

“We have to call the gas company and complain,” said John. “It’s supposed to warm up a lot in the next few days. It’s all going to melt, and our lawn is going to be ruined, and our basement can’t take it.”

He was right. So I prepared to do battle with the gas company. I walked outside with my trusty iphone and, in full view of the gas crew, took several pictures of the ice pile, from several angles. I was going to be armed with photo evidence to explain why, exactly, it was not okay that they were using our front yard as a dumping ground, even for something as innocuous as shoveled snow.

And then, something miraculous happened. That night, when I came home, the ice pile was gone. It had been relocated to (ahem) the parking strip at the corner.

I am 100% certain that seeing us take pictures of the ice pile was what finally spurred the gas crew to action. Perhaps they thought I was going to call the papers, or post it on my blog, and they got nervous. Perhaps they feel I bullied them into moving it by threatening to expose them. Whatever, I do not care, the ice pile is gone.

I do not view it as a coincidence that shortly therafter, we found and hired a new nanny.

(Yeah, now there are huge bulldozer divots in our lawn and John’s car is still broken and the insurance company reps are still being assholes, but whatever. Progress. I’m going to eat a cookie and hope February gets its act together.)

This year, in a change from years’ past, most of the votes I got for Readers’ Choice charities were general, not specific. The majority of comments I received fell into one of two camps: food pantries, and no-kill animal shelters.  Well, those are both causes I support, too.  So in a departure from past years, instead of putting a poll in this space, I’m going to make a $25 donation each to The Greater Chicago Food Depository, and PAWS Chicago.  Both are awesome organizations, four-star rated on Charity Navigator, with a proven track record. I’m delighted to support them both.

Frankly, it’s always sort of troubled me how to choose among the many great organizations recommended by people, particularly when so many have similar missions and I’m not in a good position to evaluate their efficacy. This way, I hope, I’m honoring the spirit of what people recommended, and giving to two very worthy and reputable organizations.

So thank you again, for your support and your enthusiasm for this weird little project of mine. I love doing it, I love hearing from you, and I can’t wait to do it again next year. Happy Holidays!

I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (the whole Kingsolver canon is available for Kindle download through our library, and this one weirdly had no wait list) and I liked it way more than I expected to.  I’m not quite ready to cast aside this urban life and take up farming myself, but in reading it I *was* reminded anew how many city-dwellers, poor city-dwellers in particular, are entirely removed from access to fresh healthy foods, let alone foods locally grown.

The concept of a food desert isn’t a new one, but it’s apt in many Chicago neighborhoods. Many of us struggle to “eat healthy;” imagine how much harder that would be if you lived in an area where the only places to buy food are corner stores and maybe a Walgreens.

Growing Power is technically a national nonprofit, but most of their work is in the Midwest, and I know them for their work in Chicago.  The organization’s mission is to create what it calls Community Food Systems.  In the organization’s words:

these systems provide high-quality, safe, healthy, affordable food for all residents in the community. Growing Power develops Community Food Centers, as a key component of Community Food Systems, through training, active demonstration, outreach, and technical assistance.

In Chicago, that means several urban farms that train community members (including youth, who have a heck of a time finding summer jobs to keep them off the streets) in farming, so that their communities have access to fresh, healthy, affordable food regardless of their economic circumstances.  Growing Power’s farms sell to restaurants and grocery stores, and have recently started providing food to Chicago Public Schools (a HUGE deal, as you know if you have any experience with the microwaved-in-plastic, highly processed food served in most school lunch programs.)

Particularly compelling to me is Growing Power’s work in the community that used to be Cabrini Green, one of the most notorious public housing high rises in a city full of notorious public housing high rises.  As the Cabrini buildings started coming down and the area redeveloped as mixed-income housing, the neighborhood changed so quickly (picture an enormous whole foods and rei being built virtually across the street and you’ll have an idea) that generations of the neighborhood’s residents, and the redevelopment’s mixed-income ideals, threaten to be subsumed by the pace of gentrification. Since 2003, Growing Power has operated a large and vibrant community garden on a patch of land that used to be part of Cabrini:

the overarching goal of the community garden is to help facilitate a thriving diverse community and ensuring that present residents are not cast aside in this process of transformation. . . the farm empowers neighborhood youth and residents to have increased economic opportunities through access to organic produce, nutritional education, and work-force training.

Cool, right?  Will Allen, Growing Power’s “Farmer in Chief”, is kind of a big deal- he’s a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and a James Beard Award winner. Guy knows his stuff. But for me, it’s the micro, community-level focus of Growing Power that is so compelling. They actually make a fair amount of their operating budget by selling their produce, so strictly speaking they are not entirely dependent on donations. But I think their work is so cool, and their mission so important, that I’m happy to feature them here, and to help in some small way.

No GMMA extravaganza would be complete without an appearance by this next organization:

Like the Cara Program, the Women’s Treatment Center takes a problem — in this case, addiction — and provides concrete, essential services to help women address it.  There are thousands of children in the Chicago area alone whose parents struggle with drug addiction.  For women with children, beating drug addiction is not just about beating the substance- it’s about figuring out who is going to care for your children while you do, and repairing your relationship with them as you get better.

The mission of The Women’s Treatment Center is “to provide women with a continuum of care, recovery tools, and parenting skills to maintain a sober lifestyle as they rebuild their lives and mend the bonds with their families.”

TWTC provides essential medical, mental health, and social services in a setting that can accommodate children in residential treatment.  That means that while they are receiving treatment, mothers receive parenting classes and guidance, and are able to continue to build and repair relationships with their children, rather than being separated from them for weeks or months at a time.  TWTC is also one of the few facilities in the  country that has a crisis nursery, which can provide 24-hour care for a woman’s children when she is unable to care for them herself.  This reduces one of the major barriers to treatment, as a woman can enter detox knowing that her children are safe, well cared for, and close.

In short, The Women’s Treatment Center is committed to helping women conquer substance abuse while honoring, protecting, and building essential family relationships.  Its programs address the parallel issues of treating substance abuse and taking proactive steps to prevent child abuse and neglect.  It’s an important place, and I’m happy to support them every year.  Thank you all for helping, too.

I have spent a lot of my life working with various populations that are categorized as “at risk.” At risk youth in an education setting, at risk adults struggling with addiction, depression, and crippling poverty; at risk individuals who are struggling to get back on their feet after periods of incarceration. It is easy enough to say that folks out to pull themselves together and get a job. But it is so, so hard to do that when you’re staring 100 different road blocks in the face. It’s hard to get a retail job if you read at a 4th grade level. It’s hard to land a janitorial position if you’ve never been on a job interview. It’s tough to get any on-the-books employment if you don’t have an address to put on your resume because you’re homeless.

The Cara Program is a proven, step-by-step program that prepares adults who have struggled with homeless, poverty, incarceration, and other challenges not just to enter but to succeed in the workforce.  Human services agencies all over Chicago refer people to the program who they believe are ready to take on the serious work of becoming job-ready (including strict selection criteria that includes a phone interview and a drug test.)  The Cara Program is probably best described in its website’s own words:

We don’t shield students from the realities they will face in the workplace; rather, we recreate the workplace here at The Cara Program.  We deploy an experiential training approach that reaches beyond what we teach in the classroom and extends into the very fabric of every student’s experience at The Cara Program.  We give them a manager, a work team, and responsibility.  We make them accountable to themselves, accountable to their team, and accountable to the Cara community at large.

Students receive training in job readiness with classes like professionalism, customer satisfaction, computer skills, and interviewing competency.  What makes the Cara Program so cool, and so effective, is that students simultaneously receive wrap around services from career and life coaches, who help students address their own individual barriers to job readiness (such as housing stability and access to child care).
Students have the opportunity to participate in a program-sponsored internship, and get job placement services with employer partners.  This part is key, too: the program doesn’t just get students *a* job, it strives to get them a good, living-wage job:

Rather than finding ‘just any job’ for our students, The Cara Program commits to working with companies that offer a competitive combination of wages and benefits.  We have formal standards in place for evaluating what qualifies as a ‘quality job’ (where quality is measured by exceeding a certain number of guaranteed hours worked, wage, availability of benefits  and permanency in the position). As a result, our employed students’ current average starting wage is $11.09/ hour at an average of 39 hours/ week.

We partner with companies that find real value in working with The Cara Program to fill their entry-level positions.  Companies typically tell us that Cara students are, on the whole, more motivated and more prepared for their entry-level positions than are non-Cara candidates.

The program’s numbers are startling for their success: 72% of program graduates not only land a job, but still have that job a year later.  Anyone who has worked with adults struggling to become attached to the workforce will tell you: it’s job retention that is the kicker, and it is incredibly difficult to obtain.  The Cara Program’s successes are truly remarkable.  And on top of that, Charity Navigator gives The Cara Program a 4-star rating, reserved for those organizations that exemplify transparency, accountability, and sound financial practices.

I’m super excited to feature this organization, and hope that many of you will help me out with your comments!

For anyone who may be new, here is how this works: each day this week I will feature a different charitable organization to which I had already planned to give money at the holidays. I am committing to give each featured organization a minimum $25 donation. Here is the twist: I invite everyone to read about the charity and, for every comment that I receive on the post, I’ll donate an additional 50 cents. Comments will remain open until the next day’s post goes up. You get to give money to charity, without having to spend any! Fun, right?

I like to use this space to feature smaller and local charities that do important work in my community. It’s not that I don’t also appreciate and support the work of much larger charities – I certainly do – but in every community there are smaller organizations filling real need, and I love being able to shine a small light on some of those great organizations.

Your comment need not say anything in particular (I have had many people just say “comment!” every year, and that’s fine!) but if you want, you can tell me a little about one of YOUR favorite charities. On Friday, I’ll select five charities that other people have mentioned and set up a poll. The charity that gets the most votes will get a $50 donation from me.

So! Let’s do this. Tell your friends, tell your blog and your Twitter stream, tell the random person you see on the street. Strain my wallet. Lets do some good things for people who really need it at this time of year.

*****
The first organization I’m featuring this year is unapologetically inspired by the work of one Emily Cassee, who took what started as a partnership with Huggies and ran with it, independently raising money for a local diaper bank.

Today, I feature a diaper bank that is local to me: Bundle of Joy.

As you may know, food stamps and other public assistance do not cover the purchase of diapers, and families are often driven to extreme lengths to try to conserve and reuse disposable diapers. Lack of access to clean diapers, in addition to causing families stress and embarrassment, is linked to real health problems.  No baby deserves that. Diapers are one of the first items to be snapped up at food pantries; they’re hard to keep on shelves.

Bundle of Joy was started by parents who were inspired to act after learning about diaper need in the area. They donate diapers to food pantries and child care agencies throughout the city. Bundle of Joy is 100% volunteer-based, meaning 100% of all donations go directly to purchasing diapers for families in need. That’s pretty remarkable.

So get to it! Leave a comment, and I’ll donate 50 cents to Bundle of Joy. Let’s help some families in need this holiday season.

I love Thanksgiving- a holiday devoted to eating, and no gift stress! Seventeen kinds of carbs! A socially acceptable time to eat Cool Whip and jellied cranberry sauce shaped like a can!

But in recent years, it’s gotten a little stressful in my house. My wonderful mother, who usually hosts and cooks, wants so badly for everyone to be happy, wants everything to be perfect, that she gets anxious, and stressed, and doesn’t seem to enjoy herself, and we in turn don’t enjoy OURSELVES, such is our stress at observing her stress, and…well, ours can’t be the only family like this, right?

Anyway, so this year, I had a few days off around Thanksgiving, because I changed jobs. (Yes, again. Changing jobs is, apparently, my job. This one is for good! Or at least for longer than  a year! Swearsies!)  With that extra time, I volunteered to cook the entire meal. I like cooking, it doesn’t stress me out, I figured it’d be good for everyone.  We’d eat on time! There would be no tears! We would finally have enough stuffing!

Foolish, foolish me.

It almost came off without a hitch, until the cranberry sauce gave my mother a black eye. Yes, really. Something about the fridge door hitting her elbow and bonking the dish into her eye on its way to the floor? I’m still a little unclear on details.

Yeah, we didn’t eat on time.

Still, all was not lost. This Thanksgiving will live forever in our memories as the year that my family embraced Flo Rida.

You know, Flo Rida? Or, as I call him, Flo, for short? The rapper?

This guy:

It was all my grandmother’s fault, obviously.

My grandmother came for Thanksgiving from California. She’s 93, and doesn’t get around too much, so her shopping options are limited. However, she loves Poppy more than anything on earth, I think, and would not stand for coming to Thanksgiving without a gift. So she hired a taxi to drive her to the Hallmark store to buy something. There, she found a little reindeer that sang and danced, and thought Poppy would get a kick out of it.

She didn’t look too closely, and didn’t recognize the song, but no big! It was catchy!

Damn if she wasn’t right.

Yes, inexplicably the dancing reindeer rocks out to the musical stylings of Flo, and my kid’s favorite song is now “club can’t handle me.” And my dad knows the words. My mom, too. Thanksgiving win.

Somewhere along in there I actually really started to like running.  Well, that’s not quite accurate. I often didn’t like the actual act of running, particularly starting a run. But it became my favorite way to exercise- outdoors, solo, music in my ears, rhythmic, efficient.

And then I got pregnant, tried running for a while, gave up, had a kid, moved to a new house, quit the gym, went back to work, tried to fit into my pants, ate more than my fair share of doughnuts, and finally thought “huh, I should probably just start running again.”

So here I am, very slowly trying to figure this all out again.  Wondering why, if I could run 13 miles just two years ago, a quick 2 miler sometimes makes me fear my lungs will burst.  Feeling lucky if I can squeeze in two runs a week instead of the 4-5 I was doing before. Cursing the alarm clock when it bleats at me at 5:30, when the baby is miraculously still sleeping and honestly shouldn’t I be sleeping too but I have TRIED working out after dinner and it just doesn’t work so it’s now or never, self. Get out of bed.

I’m slow. My heel hurts. I feel stupid in my traffic-cone-orange pullover that I wear to make sure I’m visible during my pre-dawn runs.

But today, I took my first run in bel0w-freezing temperatures and even though it kind of sucked, even though I got a cramp and my breathing never found a rhythm, the cold air and the pre-dawn light (thank you, end of daylight saving time, for putting that pink glow back in the sky,) felt good. I was glad to be out there.

Because I am a crazy person, I’ve committed to running the same half I ran two years ago, in New Orleans in early March.  (Full disclosure: I am running it as a relay with a friend, because for all my big talk, I’m not at all convinced I’ll be able to squeeze in ten mile training runs over the winter on icy roads with no gym membership to give me a treadmill backup. I’m not THAT crazy.) This does mean that at some point, I’m going to have to start running more than a 5K at a time, which right now seems kind of laughable. But I think it’s good to have a goal because otherwise, I might not do this at all.

So, friends, you’ve been warned. I’m probably going to start talking about running again. I’ll try to keep the douchey self-reflective posts like this one to a minimum, but I can make no promises.

A friend of mine recently told me that she was annoyed that holiday card season is coming around again, because cards are so environmentally wasteful and pointless.

That made me sad.  I love holiday cards. I particularly love holiday cards with photos, but I take all types: basic text-only, nice family photo, over-the-top bragging Christmas letter. There is no time of year when the mail is more fun and exciting than during December.

I do not, however, love most holiday card display devices.  They are often kind of over the top, no? Big and metal and you have to mount them and they cost $50?

No thank you.

A few years ago, I found these magnetic photo ropes on photojojo:

I love them.  I bought three white ones, and hung them in the hallway leading to our kitchen.  During the holidays, I hang all the cards we receive on them, so I can admire them daily (the tiny magnets are SUPER strong- I haven’t met a card they couldn’t hold.)

And they are so nice and clean and simple that I use them during the rest of the year as a substitute for a corkboard to display invitations, greeting cards, and photos:

As you can see from this terrible picture, the hallway to our kitchen does not get a lot of light. But I still love it.

The best holiday cards? Stay up on the display all year.  See that one in the upper left? That’s a Tiny Prints card.  Just saying.

So if you’re looking for a nice, simple, versatile system for displaying your holiday cards, I highly recommend photo ropes.  And if you’re looking for great custom holiday cards, I highly recommend Tiny Prints. (And not just because they’re giving me free cards- every Christmas card, shower invitation, and personalized thank you note I’ve ordered in the past 3 years has come from Tiny Prints. They’re pretty great.)  You can check out their holiday card designs here.

Now go forth and take cute pictures so you can put them on holiday cards so I can hang them on my wall! Please and thank you.

Poppy was less certain:

But she rallied:

I submit that there is nothing cuter than baby claw arms.

I had grand plans to make costumes for John and myself that matched with our little lobster- I was going to be a chef, he the Gorton’s fisherman. A whole sea-to-table thing. The slow foods movement in Halloween costumes, if you will.

But yeah, I ran out of steam, so no costumes for us.  Or so I thought.

“Nice costume!” said my boss on Monday morning.

I looked at him blankly.

“Farmer! Farmer Pseudo!” he continued. “I like it.”

Huh. I was… well, I was not wearing a costume.

And yet, twice more during the course of the day, I got further compliments.

“Farmer! Nice!” said the coffee girl.

“Are you going out to till the land?” asked our UPS guy.

TILL THE LAND, people.

So, lesson learned: do not wear your plaid shirt on Halloween, lest people assume that it’s your really half-assed attempt at a costume.

Does this shirt, plus skinny jeans tucked into boots, read “farmer” to you? Don’t you think if I was a farmer I would have, like, done my hair in pigtails or something? Or maybe worn overalls? WHAT KIND OF FARMER WEARS SKINNY JEANS? ANSWER ME THAT.

In summary:

Costume for offspring: success!

Costume for self: fail!

General sartorial choices for self: need some work, apparently!

Purchasing of far too much candy, thus guaranteeing that we will have leftovers to last us well into the new year: unqualified success!

On the whole, I’d call it a win.