28thavenue.net

Mitchell / Krueger Baby

Jenny and I are very excited to announce that we’re expecting our first child. We’re at 13 weeks, due June 4, 2010. We don’t know yet whether it’s a boy or a girl.

An article about Hartford, CT, and its parking lot problem.

For the past half-century, city leaders in Hartford have worked hard to satisfy what they deemed to be a critical need — the need for more parking, so that downtown Hartford could compete with suburban office parks and shopping centers.

This summer the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at the University of Connecticut conducted a detailed study of the cumulative effect on the city of 50 years of providing parking. What we found was startling: Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more that 300 percent — from 15,000 to 46,000 spaces. This change has had a profound and devastating effect on the structure and function of the city (see accompanying maps) as one historic building after another was demolished.

And what did the city gain from this assiduous drive to provide sufficient parking? Was it able to grow more prosperous by providing more jobs and housing for more people? If this was the desired outcome, we can consider the past 50 years to have been an abysmal failure. Over the period that parking was being increased by more than 300 percent, downtown was losing more than 60 percent of its residential population, and the city as a whole lost 40,000 people and 7,000 jobs.

I can think of another city that has too many parking lots because too many buildings were torn down..

I’ve been trying to incorporate meditation into my daily routine since seeing a video of a Google Talk on mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

I’ve enjoyed the experience so far, even if my time investment has been fairly minimal. I was encouraged today to see an article extolling the benefits of “transcendental meditation” for heart health (based on actual clinical research!)

Here is the video of Kabat-Zinn:

I got a spam comment on this blog with a link to this site.

That’s actually relevant to my interests!

This is hugely embarrassing. When I went in to vote using the new ranked-choice voting system, I figured the votes would be automatically tabulated, and whatever statistics necessary would be performed by software, to determine in each race who the winner is.

Sadly, it turns out no such software exists. The tabulation is being done by hand. What century is it? This is just pathetic.

My goal for the month of November is to keep a detailed diet and training log. I’m going to sign up for the Mora Vasaloppet ski race, as well as the American Birkebeiner (full one!). To be ready I’m beginning my training now.

I also got a bit of a shocking report back on some lab work I had done related to life insurance. In short, I need to improve my diet, I need to lose weight, and I need to exercise more.

I’m always one to make good faith starts on this sort of thing, but lose motivation three or four weeks in. I’m hoping I can make a real adjustment in my daily routine to accommodate more time for exercise, and also do a better job feeding myself. It’s hard to do.