Boston Vegetable Planting Chart

I made a simple chart of approximate seed planting times for Boston (USDA Zone 6). You can download a printable PDF of the planting chart.

Today I put together a simple raised bed in my backyard. I built it along the same design as the Food Project’s Build-a-Garden Program’s planter—which my landlord participated in last year. Other than shoveling 1300 pounds of soil needed for an 8 x 4 raised bed, it was pretty easy. The only really novel part is putting a sheet of weed-block between the ground and the planting soil to keep the vegetables from growing down into polluted city-dirt.

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Dandy’s recipe:

8 medium tomatoes, stewed
1 jalapeno
4 green onion, chopped
1/4 bunch of cilantro, chopped
2 garlic cloves

In large sauce pan, stew tomatoes and jalepeno.
Remove stem from jalapeno.
Put into blender or food processor.
Add garlic.

Pour into pan.
Add 4 green onions and cilantro.
Simmer for 15 minutes.
Salt and pepper to taste.

My alteration:
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Take all of the above ingredients, and just throw them in a blender (I use a can of whole stewed tomatoes rather than the fresh tomatoes—probably better fresh). Done.

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Brompt.com logo

Two weeks ago I launched a new website at Brompt.com. It’s a web-based service for unreliable bloggers (like myself) that sends you an email if you haven’t posted to your blog in a while. It’s sort’ve like HassleMe except Brompt actively scans your blogs RSS feed to only send reminders when you’re lax (as opposed to just sending you a reminder every so often).

It’s very practical, but I also think Brompt is really interesting conceptually too. Everyone talks about RSS as just a means to aggregating content, but there is so much other interesting metadata in an RSS feed too.

Right now the site is just the barebones service, but I’m planning on adding some statistics and such so you can track your unreliability. It’s a fun project with a lot of possibilities.

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Ponty, a cat

Meet my new cat, Jose Pierpont (“Ponty”). I got him a few weeks ago from the MSPCA and he’s somewhere in that adolescent cat phase between 10 months and a year old. He’s pretty awesome, though he has a strong penchant for pipe cleaners. more pictures

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Because of constructive criticism of some of my organization’s archaic language, I asked the Mission Based Massachusetts Listserv, a nonprofit discussion list, what terms they use in place of “poor people”. Below are all of the responses I got, which were awesome!

Some terminology…

  • low-income
  • under-resourced
  • under-served (Barbara humorously notes that “overserved” is a euphemism for intoxicated)
  • people living in poverty
  • historically and persistently marginalized groups

(thanks Michelle, Felicia, and others who are quoted below)

Some general strategies…

  • Use a preposition: Instead of “poor children” the phrase “children from low income households”. Therefore, it’s not the subject themselves, but rather their circumstances. (thanks Barbara!)
  • Use a specific measure, like “125% of the federal poverty threshold” or “50% of area median income,” whatever’s most appropriate in the context.
  • For a grant proposal, look at the language the grantmaker is using and follow their lead. (thanks Dennis!)
  • Think of the program as asset based rather than deficit based: people who benefit end up being associated with the problem and not the solution (thanks Alan!).
  • “Describing the populations we want to serve as ‘marginalized’ or ‘most vulnerable’ makes our donors feel good about themselves, but at the risk of objectifying people, using a dominant culture’s description of them as somehow Other. We try to incorporate this awareness into our outreach materials by assuming that the people we serve will be reading the materials. How would they feel about this description? How would they describe themselves? Does a description assume that the people have brought their situation on themselves? Does it assume that the people are simply victims and not actors in their lives? Does the language carry implicit judgment? Calling an activity ‘drug abuse’ carries many more judgments and assumptions than calling it ‘drug use.’ (thanks Kathy!)

  • “‘Working poor is a helpful phrase for those who are working, which reminds people that we aren’t talking about ‘welfare queens’, a term I fear may still have resonance.…I like to remind people what the actual Federal Poverty Guidelines are. We know, but many people outside our profession don’t actually know how low it is, and if you take a minute and ask people to think about how it compares to their own household income, you can see people digest what that means.” (thanks Michelle!)

    To note, from the 2008 Federal Poverty Guidelines, an individual making less than $10,400 is in poverty, while for a household of 4 poverty is earning less than $21,200 (in the lower 48 states, slightly more in Hawaii and Alaska). As of 2006 there were 36.5 million Americans in poverty (according to the US Census Bureau).

Some said that the terminology wasn’t the issue…

  • “I’m poor. It doesn’t upset me when people say I’m poor. It does upset me when the thought police waste everyone’s time talking about language issues instead of actually fighting poverty.” (thanks Pat!)
  • “There’s nothing degrading about saying someone is poor. It’s an insult only if you believe their poverty indicates their own moral failing, and THAT’s an antiquated attitude.” (thanks Dennis!)

And a related example…

This is interesting to me because I work at a prison education organization. We have lots of materials that talk about “prisoners”. An ex-prisoner recently called that word into question, saying that it was dehumanizing and he preferred to be referred to as a person (perhaps incarcerated person?). However, I work with a group of folks who deliberately call themselves Ex-Prisoners. So there’s no easy answer. (thanks Mea!)

External Resources:

Michael pointed me to two great resources:

  • Two Penny Project: To build public support for human services in Massachusetts: “…The problem with the Sympathy/Poverty frame is that it reinforces the idea that poverty is the result of bad individual choice rather than a condition that requires systemic reform. This message also recreates the sense that people will think nothing can be done that doesn’t make matters worse.…The Ford Foundation recommends that advocates frame their messages in terms of responsible planning and economic vision, with a strong secondary or reinforcing message about community planning.…” (page 3)
  • For An Economy That Works: There are a lot of resources and studies here on language. Their goal is creating effective frames of reference for poverty issues to effect policy, which may or may not be applicable to grantwriting or appeals.

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Brief article on getting a nonprofit job from the NY Times

Q. What are the biggest misconceptions about switching from the corporate world to the nonprofit world?

A. Many people are surprised to find the hours longer and stress greater than in the corporate world. Brian Olson, who left the private sector for a nonprofit in 2006, found the decision-making process to be unfocused.

“No matter how good a volunteer board is, it’s not the same as a corporate board, because everyone has a different agenda,” said Mr. Olson, who returned to the private sector a year later to be vice president for public affairs at Video Professor Inc., a company in Lakewood, Colo., that sells self-tutorial programs. “There was a purity to corporate life I missed,” he said.

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There is value, he said, to “a company just getting the job done based on the needs of the marketplace.”

Makes me think of my friend’s snarky t-shirt idea: “Get a Nonprofit Career: Make a difference in someone’s life. Your own.” or simply “Nonprofit jobs let you feel good about yourself”.

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Interesting article entitled Trust Isn’t Transitive (or, “Someone fired a gun in an airplane cockpit, and it was probably the pilot”) about a recent accidental/negligent discharge in a 747 by a pilot’s gun:

Let’s look at this quote from the article in question, attributed to Mike Boyd: “if somebody who has the ability to fly a 747 across the Pacific wants a gun, you give it to them.” This is a horribly flawed assumption, because it assumes that trust is transitive, when clearly it isn’t.

The reason trust isn’t transitive is because trust is most often based on data regarding the past which allows us to make assumptions about specific competence, quality of performance, and behaviors in the future.

We can assume that a trained pilot, when facing piloty thingies, will act like a trained pilot. WE CANNOT ASSUME THAT A TRAINED PILOT WILL ACT LIKE A TRAINED LION-TAMER WHEN FACING A WILD LION.

Skills from one domain cannot simply be moved from that domain to another

And the great example:

…many pilots will tell you that jet pilots are much more like to die on a motorcycle than they are on a plane, because they act stupid on motorcycles.

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