Cell by Cell, Row by Row…

Or: How a spreadsheet is saving my ass. Literally.

It’s not any big secret or revelation that I am, shall we say, a substantial woman. That is to say, the term “waif” will never be used in conjunction with my name. I’ve accepted that I’m never going to be a size 2, and frankly, I like having some meat on my bones. Ancestrally, my people were potato farmers, and I look like I could probably haul a few bushels myself. If I had the energy…

Which brings me to how a spreadsheet (well, sheets – I went a little overboard) is saving my ass, because, really, I’m too young to feel this old.

I can’t seem to stick with anything when it comes to exercising. I don’t see exercise as something to do for a short period of time, in an effort to lose weight for an event/season/whatever; this mirrors my attitude towards eating better (thanks, end of my first year of grad school, for making eating well very difficult…yeesh…). So even though I see exercise as a lifetime practice, I don’t actually practice it much. Until I was introduced to the spreadsheet.

My friend shared a Google docs spreadsheet with me that allowed me to log my push-ups. Not very exciting in and of itself, but since the document was shared, you could see who else was doing push-ups, how many, and what other people had to say about their progress. There were encouraging words as well as shame if you didn’t keep up. It was fun to log things and the accountability was nice. Another friend wrote about this spreadsheet system here.

Time was, the word spreadsheet gave me the shakes. But now I keep my own spreadsheets tracking my progress towards my 10 mile race in October. I don’t share them, but the very simple act of logging my runs is…I can’t even come up with the right words. It’s all of these things, cheesy as they may sound: helpful, motivational, inspiring, pride-generating, nerdy, wonderful. I get twitchy if I don’t have things to log; I’m happy to say despite a hectic schedule of late, I’ve kept completely on my training schedule, and have even added to my workouts via my new bike. Letting my inner computer nerd shine is doing wonders for my ass, saving it one column by one row at a time.

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‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

I didn’t put up a fence in my garden, but I did run some string down the sides of the plot – lines of demarcation, if you will.

Last year the person on one side of my plot redrew the lines (just around HER plot, but it cut into mine!) drawn on the wooden boards containing the whole plot. If this were the suburbs, someone just increased their density by taking my land through illicit eminent domain. The year before, the person on the other side of me dug his irrigation trenches/walkways into my plot, and when I met him, he remarked how nice it was to meet me, and how it was no trouble for him to help with my trench….  Not how I saw it. I mean, sure, I’ll use it, but if we’re going to share a trench, half of the space should come from my plot and half from his. If only our garden plot could be divided with appropriate buffer space…an easement…

So this year, they only drew the lines to show the boundaries of each plot on one side. So 15-20 feet away, there is nothing keeping you from creating a bigger wedge than you should have and screwing your neighbor. OK, OK, I’m being dramatic, but after two years of not meeting my neighbors before we could talk about sharing space and having precious real estate taken away, I decided to go ahead and mark out the space. Now, if you’ve been to my apartment, you know that I occasionally walk around with a level making sure that my pictures are alles in Ordnung. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I went down to my garden with a level. Yep. I wanted to be fair, so I put in nail in the middle of each stripe of spray paint marking the boundaries of my garden, and measured the distance between them. I then extended string down the western side of the plot, and made sure the juncture of string and wood formed a right angle, drove in another nail, and measured (down to 1/8″) the same distance out as the other side, drove in a nail, and extended another string, forming a boundary on the eastern side of my plot. I am a colossal nerd, but a fair one.

Much of this was done to protect my neighbors’ plots, as well. I can’t eyeball a straight line to save my life, and I would have hated to start digging and planting, only to find out that I’d taken over some of their space.

So why do I feel like a hostile neighbor? Now that the trenches are dug and my plot is ready for planting, should I remove the string?

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Car Dependency and Outdoor Living

For the last six years, between three different workplaces and two different locations, I’ve been able to choose my method for getting to work. That ends in a month when I begin an internship in another city that is not serviced by public transit from my city, and is, frankly, too far for me to get there by any other mode of transportation.

I’m very excited about the organization that I’m working with and the work that I’ll be doing for them, but with summer approaching, I’ll miss my commutes that include time outdoors and not in a car. To be sure, I won’t miss showing up to work looking like I just stepped out of a sauna in my business casual (thanks, DC summer!), but I did come to appreciate walking by trees, breathing non-circulated air, and using at least some of my own power to transport myself. If I am able to secure a job with this organization after I complete my program, I will move closer. I’m absolutely not interested in an all-auto, long commute. This summer’s commute is a reverse commute, which makes it slightly more bearable…but only slightly. I’ve gotten used to rarely needing gas, oil changes, and the like.

Aside from wanting to save money on gas and car maintenance, and from wanting to reduce my carbon footprint, I really love my pedestrian commutes because they provide some form of outdoor living – to accomplish a fundamental task, I have to spend more time outside than just walking to/from my car. When I think of great places, I think of places where spending time outside is more than the time you spend in your driveway, and where time outside isn’t simply just destination-based. It’s not just about getting to the park; what are the routes to the park like? If you wanted to walk or bike there, is it attractive and safe to do so?

How wonderful would it be if we could really live outdoors to some extent? I don’t mean that we should all move into tents, but I do mean that I judge a locality based on its options for outdoor living. Are there restaurants with ample outdoor seating? Are streets lined with shade trees? Do the parks invite you in, encouraging you to spend time there, with a variety of activities or features? Are “public spaces” inviting or hostile? I’ll have to take some pictures, but some of the “public spaces”/plazas in my town are, yes, technically public, but it wouldn’t be clear to someone unaffiliated with the buildings next to them, and they aren’t exactly the most inviting spaces. In other words, are “public spaces” conducive to outdoor living, or are they just another feature for developers to brag about and planning students to create GIS projects out of?

A New Orleans porch designed for outdoor living.

A few weeks ago I was in New Orleans for a conference. I’m smitten with the outdoor living there. Granted, it was April, and I’m sure July is a bit of a different story, but from what I could see, this is a city that knows how to live outside.

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