Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Tour de Troit

    Today I enjoyed a leisurely 30-mile-ish bike ride around downtown Detroit on the Tour de Troit. We started at Roosevelt Park, by the amazing ruined Michigan Central Station, whizzed downtown and through Campus Martius by the Compuware building, crossed the Belle Isle Bridge and spun around the circumference of Belle Isle before stopping in Gabriel Richard park for a break. We then went down Jefferson Avenue, wandered through the gracious tree-lined streets of Indian Village, and then eventually through the Wayne State/Medical Center Campus.

    The Detroit Free Press said there would be over 2,000 riders. I really can’t say, but it seemed like there were a lot of cyclists. The police escort was great. They blocked the roads for us and zoomed up and down the line on their motorcycles. With their support, we cyclists enjoyed the roads all to ourselves – no fear, no stoplights, easy biking.  It was an easy pace, sometimes we were quite slow in the pack, or held by police at a particularly busy intersection, and other times we got to speed along once the pack was stretched out. The experience was one of light effort (except at the end, when I was tired and cold) and a fizzy joy in the freedom of the streets.

    Along the route, I saw many things, and noticed a few other gaps.

    The foremost highlight was the Belle Isle Bridge, which is still lovely, and of which I’m inordinately proud as my great grandfather and I think his brothers moved to Michigan from Wisconsin to work on it. Greiling Brothers Construction Company was part of that project.

    I noticed the absence of the old Uniroyal plant, which was just to the south of the bridge on Jefferson Avenue. It had striking “mural” of tires on its walls. Now it is a field – apparently a quite polluted one at that (though there’s now a cleanup plan). I also looked for the Mexican restaurant, Armando’s I think, we frequented when I was young. I think the building was still there, but no longer a restaurant.

    I thought of more family history in that areqa, vague to me now. I think we had fancy relatives who lived in or near Indian Village. I recalled  a family friend who lived in the Whittier apartment building on Detroit’s Gold Coast of high rises overlooking the Detroit River and Windsor. We went by the Roostertail on Jefferson Avenue, site of my senior prom.  Memories flooded back of family stories and of time spent with family driving from our home in Grosse Pointe to downtown Detroit along Jefferson Avenue. We came to festivals at Hart Plaza, we came to dine, we came for ballet class for me and my sister, we went to dance events, and we came to go to church.

    As we cycled through Detroit, we passed by neighborhoods that were new to me –  new subdivisions just off of Jefferson Avenue.  We passed through neighborhoods that looked passably prosperous such as Indian Village. And we passed through neighborhoods with trees circling houses no longer there, burned out houses, empty lots, and rough looking homes and commercial buildings. We saw lots of liquor stores and dry cleaners. I don’t think I saw a grocery store. I’m not sure all of the dry cleaners were open. We saw urban gardens in reclaimed plots in the Woodbridge neighborhood.

    Some of it seemed very ordinary. Just people going about their Saturday. We saw folks mowing and weed whacking lawns, three football games, and one basketball game on a desolate lot overlooking a manufacturing plant. We saw lots of kids waving frantically as the parade of bikes went past, thrilled when we waved back. Many adults waved too. Most of the other passers by were either happy or amused to see us. Only a handful were laughing at us.  I witnessed only two incidents of negativity, both by irate drivers annoyed by having to wait for the cyclists to pass.

    We ended the ride back at Roosevelt Park, in front of the ruined Michigan Central Station building. A great day. Lots of memories, and some signs of hope to savor.

  • Pie Cherries – Reason #357 to love Michigan

    I love Michigan. I love living here for many reasons:

    • The weather is fine for knitting much of the year,
    • Snow lining tree branches is gloriously beautiful,
    • Spring ephemerals and flowering trees are a miracle after ice and sleet,
    • Fall is crimson, fiery orange, and golden leaves, enjoyed in crisp sunshine and then tossed by moody winds, and
    • Summer is grand – sultry, sunny, and replete with yummy local fruit.
    A photo of cherries
    Michigan tart cherries – yum!

    The king of local fruit is the sour or tart cherry. The tart cherries are a semi-translucent red, like captured sunlight, which they are. They make the most amazing cherry pie. Oh, and they don’t travel well, so they’re not something that gets hurled across the globe with abandon:  you have to enjoy them right here. And maybe because of that, for me, they’re also connected to memories of other summers and other pies.

    I sat on my patio this evening, pitting these cherries with a hairpin, feeling their juice running down my forearm to my elbow. More than most things these days, these cherries are a signal of a particular place and a particular moment in the season.  Slurp in the summertime.

    Coming for dessert tonight?

  • A lot of moxie for his size – kildeer papa

    Happy Father’s Day.

    In May, my husband and I went to the Rock Shoppe in Plymouth, Michigan to find some stones for the edging of the pond in the back yard. It was a sunny spring day and we were wandering the extensive grounds looking for just the right thing – kind of greenish slate tiles. We went into a more remote fenced area with less foot traffic, and an insistent bird got our attention. He was on the ground near one of the bins of rocks, maybe 10 feet away from us. He chirped at us, seeming to stamp his foot to tell us to move along. He stood his ground, staring at us.

    CVNP – Killdeer Protecting Nest, originally uploaded to Flickr by Andrew 94.

    Both the male and the female kildeer incubate the pair’s eggs. According to this description from Audubon, only the female tries her classic wounded wing act to distract us from her nest. The male exhibits more of a stay-and-fight defense. As he stood there, glaring, I was able to spot the nest of spotted eggs in the gravel road of the rock yard, a few inches from his toes (this is not my photo, but it is a nice one!).

    I thought about how ridiculous it was. A 6-inch tall bird was having a face-off with two 6-foot humans! We meant no harm, but it is possible in our obliviousness we might have blundered into the nest. His chirp was a clear warning, and he seemed fearless and confident. How apt is his Latin name Charadrius vociferus.

    We turned away, and as we left, he settled back on his nest.

    Papa kildeer – may your babies be as fierce as you and live long.

  • Delivering Happiness shares Zappos story, teaches

    Zappos.com CEO Tony Hseih has released Delivering Happiness: A path to profits, passion, and purpose. I have followed Zappos CEO and several others Zappos team members on Twitter for a while now, and I’ve enjoyed learning from him about his studies specifically on happiness. Since my title at my day job is Director of Happiness, it seemed a matter of professional commitment to keep up with Hsieh. By following him, I learning of The Happiness Hypothesis and commented on it here in my blog.

    My Review

    Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
    Delivering Happiness cover

    I enjoyed the book, which was a mix of autobiography and riches to risk to riches business story. Apparently he was a born entrepreneur: resourcefully avoiding piano and violin practice while starting several small businesses with his parents’ blessing – worm farm, button mail order business, magic tricks, and more.

    Yet, what makes the book valuable for the rest of us is where he details moments where he failed and what he learned. Critical to Zappos success, it seems, was what he and his partners learned from an early failure hidden inside a success – the loss of culture that occurred in the growth of their first successful venture – LinkExchange (eventually acquired by Microsoft). He and his partners vowed not to grow Zappos that way, and Zappos has created and maintained a strong culture that they feel is critical to success of the business and maintaining it as a place the founders and the employees want to work.

    And, everyone knows that their Las Vegas customer service team is amazing. In this book, he helps us understand how that evolved and what Zappos does to support that WOW culture. It has been codified into ten core values (Zappos website page on the core values), but what is obvious from the book is that the culture predates the values being crystallized. I participated in the session to draw up the core values for my current employer, and I admit to being more than a little jealous of Zappos’ core values. They are inspirational and wonderful. My favorite Zappos core value is:

    create fun and a little weirdness

    It just seems to recognize that teams are built by people being themselves (a little weird), through bonding events (by definition, these events stand out, so are also non-normal), and by laughing together.

    Another critical learning was not to outsource key components of their business. The Zappos team outsourced their warehouse logistics in Kentucky, and then bore the brunt of dissatisfied customers and reinventing the warehousing operation to solve the problem (taking it back in house).

    What impressed me about the book is Hsieh’s (and partners’) open leadership style, and his openness in sharing internal Zappos communications and their core values with the rest of us. The book reprints emails sent at times of stress and change, including a note from around the time of their layoffs in 2008, and then the one announcing acquisition by Amazon.com in 2009.

    Giveaway x 2

    I received a complimentary copy of the book through the Delivering Happiness advance copy giveaway program for bloggers. They were quite clear that I should provide an honest review.

    Well, in true Zappos “Deliver WOW through service” style, they sent not only my advance copy, but an extra advance reading copy for me to share. If you’d like my giveaway copy of the book, please leave a comment on this post or on the Facebook note where this blog will be syndicated. I will choose a commenter at random on June 15 and award the book!

    If the award period is past, if you didn’t get the book I’m giving away, if you prefer hardcover, or if you dislike commenting on my blog, of course it is available at Amazon.com/deliveringhappiness and at the book’s website DeliveringHappinessBook.com.

  • Long term thinking: the value of staying in one place (green #13)

    Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
    Depletion and Abundance cover

    I just finished Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front. It’s at least in part an eco-survivalist guide to finding your way in peak oil, climate change, and the forecasted hard times that will come from energy crisis. I don’t agree with it entirely, I have to say that I’m not as doom-and-gloom as she is (perhaps just my denial kicking in), but I appreciated several sections of her book.

    One section which inspired me to rethink was her description of the mobility of Americans – apparently we move once every five years on average. Given we’re transitory and perhaps expect future transitoriness, we don’t consider our relationship with our own yards in the way we might if we anticipated a lifelong relationship with the place. Just using the word “yard” seems less intimate and less nurturing than using the word garden, even though these two words have a common origin. Yard seems to be about what it stores (brickyard, lumberyard) where a garden evokes what it grows. Garden is clearly more creative and sustaining in my mind.

    That struck me as a strong contrast to, say, a book I read last summer, The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France, in which the first story chronicled someone weeding and reclaiming an ancient garden plot, thinking of the folks who gardened there before. That whole book seemed permeated with a longstanding relationship to the land, though it in part elegized it.

    One of the reasons I stopped writing about being green was because I was moving to a bigger house on a bigger lot. And, the other day, when I came out the side door and encountered a bed of peonies in full bloom that I didn’t plant, hadn’t tended, and didn’t even notice in bud, I said to myself “what have I done to deserve this.” The peony blooms shocked me. And I was grateful to the previous owner (not sure which, the prior residents were there for only one year) who put that in for me to enjoy today.

    Although there was a fair bit of doom and gloom in the start of Astyk’s book, the depletion part, she did have a clear vision for abundance. Astyk advocates adapting in place, avoiding the cost and waste of razing the current infrastructure, by retrofitting our homes for increased energy efficiency, planning for intergenerational and more collaborative living, and cultivating gardens to increase our self-sufficiency. She’s envisioning a future of suburbia filled with familes and neighbors cultivating the eco-equivalent of Victory gardens. A sweet vision.

    So, maybe I don’t have to feel quite so terrible about the lovely garden and the land we’re enjoying. I benefitted from the past investment of the prior inhabitants of my house. For our part, we’ve put in a small garden bed holding lettuce, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and shallots so far. We will add additional kitchen garden terraces in other years. Next, we will invest in longer term items such as fruit- and nut-bearing trees and bushes, inspired by a visit and a rough plan by Nature and Nurture. I’d like to stay where we are for a long time, and plan for abundance.

  • Facebook – I’m staying, for now

    Subtitle: I really do get comments on this blog, just not on this blog.

    I heavily use a handful of social media sites: Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, Ravelry (knitting community), and Flickr. I value each for different things, and Facebook is my least favorite. Especially since now they’re trying to take over the Internet.

    Yet, Facebook is where my friends and family are, so I go there to hang out with them. Since I do not do a lot to maintain my Facebook presence, I pull in feeds to it from several places. I do pull items in from my Flickr account and from this blog.

    I have mixed feelings about the broadcasting I’m doing on Facebook via the blog. I like it that my friends engage with what I write – leaving me their reactions or just an “atta girl”. Yet, by feeding the blog into Facebook, I’ve let Facebook capture the interaction on the blog post. So, instead of comments on the post, I get comments on my notes in Facebook. One level away.

    I like this less than comments on the blog itself, but most of the kind folks who comment on Facebook would never encounter the posts except as notes on Facebook.

    A conundrum indeed. I value the interactions more than comments in “the right place”, so I’ll continue to do this. Unless, that is, Facebook drives me away…