Winter/Spring rooftop garden 2012

It's been unseasonably warm in Philadelphia for the past few weeks, so my rooftop garden is already off to a pretty great start. About two weeks ago I soaked some snow peas for a few days to get them ready for planting, and a week and a half ago I turned the soil in the planters I'd left on the roof since last year, added about an inch of mushroom compost and put some peas and garlic cloves in the ground.

Garlic shoots started popping up almost immediately. I'm wondering if I should have put the garlic a little deeper beneath the surface -- but I've got garlic hanging out in my closet so I'll probably do a second planting next weekend and try digging a little deeper this time.

This is my first year growing garlic, and to be honest I haven't done a whole lot of research. Much of what I read about growing vegetables in containers last year proved to be only partially useful at best. It turns out my rooftop has its own rather unusual microclimate and I suspect the best way to figure out what will grow well there is to keep seeding as many plants as possible.

To give my plants a little shade, I've placed the planters up against the only wall available. It's on the north side, so the plants get a nice southern exposure... most of the time. At certain parts of the day the sun dips below the high-rise building directly southeast of us and everybody gets a little more shade.

But when the sun is out it gets very bright and very warm. I've already realized that I have to water the plants more often than I would if they were in the ground because the planters dry out pretty quickly. 

It's also very windy on the rooftop, so plants have to be pretty sturdy to survive.

Last year I discovered that snow peas I directly seeded outside came up with nice thick stems while those I started indoors had long, thin stalks. 

But since I had some extra sprouted seeds, I figured I'd try a few indoors anyway just in case cold weather returned and decided to wipe out everything I've planted on the rooftop before the little guys were established.

As it turns out, the seeds I started indoors are suffering the same fate as last year's. I suspect if I tried to take them outside they'd wilt and fall over just as quickly as last year's.

At least part of the problem is probably that it's hard to find places to put seed trays and pots in the house that are cat-proof. While the cats rarely actually eat the plants, they do like to paw at them, turn over small planters, and play in the soil. 

I suspect it's also just not windy enough inside, and the temperatures don't get as hot and cold, which makes it tough to prepare the little baby snow peas for the harsh realities of life on the roof.

Anyway, long story short, my goal at this point is to find plants that aren't only container-friendly, but which also have relatively short yield times. That will allow me to plant as many veggies as possible directly in outdoor planters since I can plant snow peas in March, hopefully get a harvest in April or May, and start peppers and beans in May and hopefully allow them to grow up around the snow peas so that by the time the weather's really warm enough for the summer veggies to thrive I'll have gotten sick of snow peas and I'll be ready to cut down those vines.

You'll notice there's a lot of "hope" in that last paragraph. I'm not really sure this will work. Technically you're supposed to plant peppers indoors about 6 weeks before last frost and then transplant them outside. I'm just not sure that any plants I try to transplant will actually bear much fruit. 

I mean, I'll try it, because there are more seeds in my packet than I really need for direct seeding outdoors. I'm just not sure it will work.

I may also break down and pick up a few plants from a nursery to transplant, but I'd like to grow as much as possible from seed, just so I can actually figure out how best to grow things three stories up in the urban wilderness of Philadelphia.

Speaking of which, despite limited success with last year's spinach crop, I've decided to try a few leafy greens again this year. There are a few shoots of what could be spinach popping up... but it could also be weeds. You'd be amazed just how many weeds find their way into pots placed on a rooftop thanks to bugs, birds, wind, and trees.

Last year's green onions also don't quite seem to be ready to go away. 

Book review: Visit Sunny Chernobyl

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It sounds like a silly idea at first: visiting seven of the most polluted places on the planet and treating them as vacation spots. But from the moment he hits the ground in Chernobyl and as we follow him to Canada, Texas, the Pacific Garbage Patch, Brazil, China, and India, Blackwell is an engaging story teller, combining anecdotes with facts, philosophy, interesting observations about environmentalism and the environment, and his own personal journey.

It's also fascinating to take a guided tour of some of the places you're least likely to ever visit, including the patch of water in the Pacific where enormous amounts of trash accumulate and few boats ever travel and the radiation zone around Chernobyl.

At times Visit Sunny Chernobyl feels like 7 essays that would have made great magazine articles strung together into an aimless book. But there are two strong themes holds the stories together:

• Humans aren't just destroying the environment. We're part of it, and we have to live with the consequences. 
• Even the most polluted places in the world have their charms... people who love them, still live in them, and make the best of what they're given. 

Visit Sunny Chernobyl is surprisingly upbeat for a book about environmental disaster tourism. Instead of focusing on the devastation, Blackwell focuses on showing the world as it is, not as it should be or even could be.

That's not to say we shouldn't try to avoid life-threatening environmental catastrophes and reduce pollution. But that all sort of goes without saying... so it isn't said much in this book, which makes it an unusual alternative to most books about the environment I've read.

This is why we don't spend much money on cat toys

This week I picked up a few items from IKEA and assembled a new standing desk for my office. As you might imagine, there was a bit of cardboard packaging left over.

Fortunately, it hasn't gone to waste.

Puck and Ollie have been making good use of the cardbaord as a kitten tunnel for hiding, running, and general purpose silliness.

Sure, we've bought the kids plenty of little toys from the pet stores over the years. But nothing amuses kittens as much as a cardboard box, no matter what shape or size it is.



If you watch closely, you'll notice that at one point before she pounces, Ollie is poised on her back paws with her front legs lifted in the air before her. I'm pretty sure this defies at least a few laws of physics.

My new standing desk workstation

For the past few years I've spent a lot of time sitting in a chair staring at a computer.

When I was younger I worked in retail and stood behind a cash register or roamed a sales floor for 8 hours a day. When I worked as a full time radio news reporter, I spent my fair share of time sitting at a desk to make phone calls, write stories, and edit audio. But at least I left the office from time to time to go interview someone, cover a press conference, or head to a breaking news scene.

But I've been a full time blogger for the past few years, and if my home office wasn't on the third floor and my kitchen on the first, I could probably spend 10 hours or more glued to a chair.

This isn't healthy.

For the past year or two I've been waking up early to work out for 30 to 60 minutes before showering, eating, and getting to work. I'm glad I've built a morning workout into my routine, but it's not necessarily enough to offset the health effects of doing practically nothing for the rest of my day.

My sitting posture is also pretty awful, and I suspect I'd be in for some pretty serious back pain if I kept to business as usual.

So I decided a while ago that I'd like to try a standing desk, but I was a little put off by the high cost of existing solutions. One problem is that I'm relatively short, so a desk that's standing height for some people might not be standing height for me.

I also wasn't sure I wanted to stand all day.

I started looking at adjustable desks such as the GeekDesk or JayMil Sit-to-Stand desk, but $1000 seemed like a lot of money to spend on a solution that I wasn't sure I'd be able to use.

On February 1st, I decided to just try raising my keyboard, mouse and monitor by propping various items on top of my existing desk. The first attempt didn't work out very well, but I found a few boxes that were almost the right height, and then grabbed some spare wood from the basement and created a stand a few inches high to elevate those boxes a bit more.

The end result? The setup was actually so comfortable that I wound up using it for over a month.

Since the desk wasn't easily adjustable, I basically stood for most of my work days during that time, and only sat down when using a laptop or tablet.

At the end of the first day at the standing desk my legs were killing me, but I actually had more energy at the end of the work day than I'd had in ages. After a few more days, I was able to stand for 8-10 hours without my legs aching, although my feet do still get sore. I haven't entirely decided whether it's better to wear shoes or not to wear shoes while working at the desk.

I also found myself taking lunch breaks for the first time in years. I mean real breaks where I go down to the dining room and sit down with a book to read and eat.

Since there was no sitting at the computer, I learned to value this break in the middle of my day which allowed me to relax for a brief period before returning to work. Short relaxing breaks are good on the feet, legs, and the mind and I should have been taking lunch breaks before -- but somehow it always seemed easier to just grab some food and then sit down at my desk and eat by the computer.

Anyway, the wine crate and spare lumber solution was never meant to be permanent, but I was still reluctant to spend $1000 on a new desk.

Fortunately there's another option. IKEA sells a series of adjustable tablet legs called Vika Byske that can be extended as high as 42 and 1/8th inches. They're some of the most expensive tablet legs IKEA sells, but at $30 each, I was able to pick up 4 legs plus an inexpensive tabletop for less than $200.

I splurged and bought a reasonably comfy bar stool for another $90 so that I can sit at the table from time to time if my feet get sore.

In order to adjust the legs you need to twist them one at a time, so the IKEA desk isn't as easy to raise or lower as one with an electric motor. But it's a heck of a lot cheaper, and since it is adjustable I was able to use the desk for a day or two, decide that it was a little too high, and then remove everything from the tabletop, lower the legs, and try again.

Now I have a desk that's comfortable to stand at for an extended period... and as an added bonus, it doesn't offer the same storage options that my old IKEA desk did, so it's a lot less cluttered.

The desk was a little wobbly at first, and I can't anchor it to the wall because it's up against an exterior wall that I can't drill into. But I discovered that if I placed the back of the tablet tightly against the wall and then lengthened the front table legs a little so that the back of the tablet presses firmly against the wall, the desk no longer shakes.

Unfortunately that means I can't run any wires behind the table. And since cable connecting my monitor and desktop PC isn't long enough to run around the side of the table, I had to place the PC on the tablet -- where I'm noticing that it's actually pretty noisy. But I may replace the PC one day or at least get a quieter fan, while I'm hoping to use the desk for many years.

A side effect of my month with the wine crate solution is that I've gotten used to using a single monitor instead of a dual-screen setup. I bought a 21.5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel monitor a while back, but I'd been using it alongside an older 1280 x 1024 pixel display -- which was kind of overkill. Really I just need enough space to run two apps side-by-side or view multiple websites side-by-side.

Ideally, I'd like a 2560 x 1600 monitor, but right now those are expensive enough to make motorized standing desks look cheap.

But the 1920 x 1080 pixel display is really almost good enough for my needs, and it uses less energy and takes up less space than my dual display setup, so I've put my old 1280 x 1024 pixel monitor in the closet for now.

Soon I may look for a riser that will lift my remaining monitor a few inches higher. While the desk is at the perfect height for typing, I'd like to be able to look straight ahead at the display instead of slightly down.

Anyway, long story short: since I started experimenting with a standing desk I've had more energy, fewer back aches, and I suspect I'm building muscle in my legs. I've learned to value the time I do take to sit down and relax, but to treat it as the exception rather than the rule.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Note: I'm still experimenting with how best to write about books without reading spoilers. I think I've largely managed to do that here, but if you don't want to know anything about the series other than whether it's worth reading, the answer is yes. 

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just spent the last week reading The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It's the first time I've read three books in a week since I was a teenager and didn't really have much to do with my free time other than read books for hours on end... but this tale was so engaging I found myself making time to read, during lunch breaks, before bed, before dinner -- I couldn't put the books down.

That's largely because Collins does a great job of pacing her story. Each book has 27 chapters divided into 3 sections per book. So it doesn't take long to finish a chapter, and more often than not you're faced with a cliffhanger at the end which makes you want to extend that lunch break until you read just a little more so you can find out what happens next.

The characters are also all very alive... until they're not, and then sometimes they're even more alive in the reader's mind. There's a lot of death in these books, which isn't surprising because it's a series about war, starting with aftermath of a war that had led people to do atrocious things to other human beings and later about another war... which doesn't seem much better even if the cause seems more noble.

Collins's books present a coming of age story in a post-apocalyptic world where there's no such thing as a happy ending. It's sort of what you would get if you crossed Harry Potter with The Handmaid's Tale and throw in a bit of Lord of the Flies and the reality TV show Survivor as well as a healthy dose of criticism of said reality TV culture.

That might not sound like the sort of thing that'd make for a fun read, and maybe it isn't. But it's engrossing.

As we follow the protagonist Katniss Everdeen through the story, it becomes more and more clear that while she's the heroine of the story, she's also the victim -- and nothing that happens will change that. It's all the more tragic because she's clearly operating at the center of the conflict and on the sidelines at the same time.

As a 16 and 17 year old, she's a pawn in a game that she barely understands. She's a fighter, and a survivor and from time to time she has flashes of charisma and brilliance that bind the characters around her (and the reader) to Katniss... but she also makes rash decisions, jumps to conclusions that are often wrong, and leads us on a journey that could turn out so many different ways that it should probably come as no surprise when Collins concludes the story in a totally unsatisfying but completely logical way.

Following the story from Katniss's perspective, reading her thoughts, it's hard not to feel like a confused teenager reading the story -- but it's hard to imagine anyone thrown into the bloody world of the Hunger Games making any more sense of the situation, be they 16 or 60.

Part of what makes the story work, and makes the plot twists so unpredictable is that we're following Katniss down every wrong turn she makes... because they make sense, while the situations she finds herself in don't.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading these books -- although I probably could have lived without the love triangle that felt kind of unnecessary to the plot.

How many people do you know that meet their true soulmates as a teenager? Yes, extreme conditions lead to extreme emotions, so I suppose Harry and Ginny really could spend the rest of their lives happily together after defeating Voldemort, and I suppose it's possible that Katniss could find love, comfort, and maybe even some happiness with Gale or Peeta... but while boys are fawning over Katniss she spends much of the story not even bothering to examine her own feelings because she's got better things to do, like feeding her family, trying to stay alive, or fighting to the death.

So the growing tension over which boy she'll choose that grows as the series reaches its conclusion feels kind of superfluous. It doesn't exactly ruin the story, but by the end, you can't help but feel that the romance was more of an afterthought than anything.

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Review: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a tech blogger and journalist I've been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I've focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a company that's combined openness, secrecy, and innovation to create an empire out of products that work extraordinarily well... but which scare the pants off of some people who stop to think about just how much information Google has about all of its users.

I'm a big fan of Levy's skills at turning highly technical topics into engaging narratives by focusing on the people behind the products. But in Google's case, that's an awful lot of people. At last count the company had around 20,000 employees, and while Levy didn't interview them all, unlike some of Levy's earlier books, In the Plex feels more like a series of distinct articles than a comprehensive story.

But most of those articles are worth reading and I enjoyed getting a feel for the people behind the search engine, email system, book scanning product, and high profile decisions to enter... and then exit China, among other things.

There's no way to avoid the fact that this book feels like a work in progress. It was published in April, 2011 -- when Google's social tools included Buzz, Orkut, and Latitude, but months before Google Plus or Search Plus Your World arrived on the scene.

But In The Plex paints a picture of how the insiders at Google think and provides a framework for understanding some of the things that have happened since the book's publication -- and a picture of what happens when a startup out to change the world becomes the established player that already did.

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Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)

Force of Nature: How Wal-Mart Started a Green Business Revolution-and Why It Might Save the World by Edward Humes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn't ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it's tough to make a profit (but it's tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn't pay its employees a living wage, faces more gender discrimination lawsuits than I can count... and the list goes on.

But over the past half decade Walmart has also made some astonishing strides toward greening its business.

The sheer economies of scale are astounding. Walmart has enough locations and employs enough people that simply turning off the lights in the vending machines in employee break rooms saves $1.5 million per year.

Any small change the company makes has a huge impact. So when Walmart decides to reduce packaging, make vehicles more fuel efficient, use organic cotton, or make other changes, it can generate millions of dollars in savings and/or have far-reaching effects on the environment.

Things get even more interesting when the company starts looking at ways to encourage suppliers to make their industries (dairy, fish, clothing, electronics, and others) more sustainable.

Of course, the fact that Walmart can have such an impact is also evidence that the company is by its very existence bad for the environment. Walmart and other national and international retail chains depend on shipping supplies and finished products across huge distances in huge quantities -- and many of those items are things that nobody really needs in the first place.

It's nice to think that the solution is to end the era of big-box retailers and go back to mom and pop stores, but that doesn't seem very likely given the current state of affairs, and Humes paints a pretty good portrait of a company using its clout to generate the next-best thing: a world where mass produced products aren't simply stocked on store shelves as if they sprung from the ground already finished. Instead, retailers like Walmart are taking an active role in determining the environmental impact of everything they sell -- and soon may be taking more steps to ensure that consumers also have access to that information to help make better informed choices.

I'm not sure that I'm any more likely to shop at Walmart after reading this book, but it does make me feel slightly better about the direction our consumption-based economy is headed.

My carbon footprint is smaller than most people's. I don't own a car. I work from home. I don't eat meat. And for the past year I've been buying most of my produce from local sources at farmers markets.

But it will take a lot more than my personal choices to change the world... and while Walmart and stores like it are certainly part of the problem, some are also starting to become part of the solution... to a degree.

Humes could probably spend a little more time in this book discussing the areas where Walmart has fallen short of its environmental promises -- and in other areas as well. But he does a good job of describing the process of Walmart's greening since 2004 by putting human faces on the story and profiling the people that are making things happen... or at least trying to... or at least saying they're trying too...

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