A New Life for a Chair

I was away all day Tuesday so the lonely chair had to just endure the day more or less in solitude.  I'm hoping the occasional walker-by at least acknowledged it, asked how it was feeling.  But then, in the evening, an email arrived from a blog reader asking a little more personal information about the chair.  Could it be dried out?  Could it be clean enough?  And, if so, a new life might be possible.  I promised that, in the morning, when it was light and I wasn't so tired, I would make an assessment.

Fortunately, in the morning the sun was shining and a light breeze was blowing and the chair was presenting itself at its best, which was a low standard, but still.  Sitting there in the somewhat de-forested copse, it didn't seem so wet, or even so put upon by the birds.  The top of the cushion was damp to my hand, and when I lifted the cushion up, there were clearly water stains beneath where the rain had run down.  But that breeze was feeling very good and the sun was gentle upon it, so I turned the cushion upside down so that the air could reach down into the chair and gently roped a half-tarp about the whole thing in order that, if it started raining again, no further water would assail it.

And returned to report my assessment.  Which was that it was probably not terribly wet nor terribly unclean.  In fact, looked pretty clean and might dry out okay, but probably a personal look-see by the inquirer would be worthwhile.  And, by the end of the day, the inquirer's freighter had whisked the chair off to a new life.  Or a soon-to-be new life, as it was going to spend a little time drying out first.  And then, the end of the story is the beginning of a new story: Can a formerly homeless chair from Point Roberts make it in a Seattle apartment?  Big Chair in a Much Bigger City.  Or, Traveling without a Passport.

Thanks to the inquirer for moving things along. 

Keeping One's Eye on Whatever

I’ve never been very good at watching sports like football where the ball is small and is moved around quickly and where everybody pretends to be holding/hiding it. I’m always surprised to find that the ball is in some other part of the field than where I had thought it was. But, I have always thought that in real life my ball spotting skills are somewhat better. Apparently not so much.

This past week, while I was fretting about the potential demise of Sterling Bank, what was actually demising was the Point Roberts trash collection business. A letter went out to all the residents a day or so ago announcing that, as of June 30, the owner was turning in his curbside trash collecting certificate (this certificate permits him to have a monopoly practice) and would henceforth settle in to tending the transfer station to which we are free to cart our trash and recyclables, although not, presumably, for free.

Well, this has been a long time coming and it’s not that I didn’t think this conclusion was a possibility, but rather that I thought it wouldn’t happen quite this soon. According to the owner, he is calling it quits because it is not feasible to keep trying to conduct the business and also to engage in the drawn out regulatory and legal issues that have arisen between him, the county, the state commission, and some residents. According to the June issue of the All Point Bulletin, a County Judge has ordered him to provide extensive information about the business (including maintenance records for his trucks), and the WUTC said it was conducting a financial audit. (This newspaper account was written before the decision to throw in the towel.)

Well, we are all engrossed in considerations of the appropriate role of empathy these days because of Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, and a charge of excessive demands from bureaucracies is likely to elicit such empathy. Who knows, however, where truth, justice, or high moral tone lies in all this. Certainly I don’t. It’s very difficult to know anything about such issues without a willingness to look through and analyze carefully a lot of information, and information is not always readily available, even in these days of the google and all it offers. But even if it were available, it might be that there are very different views about what are the important issues, what outcomes are being sought, and what is the point of the dispute. What we do know, however, is that after months and months of discussion and charges and countercharges, of litigation and mediation, of hearings proposed and conducted, is that we no longer have either garbage pickup service or recyclable pickup service.

My sense of this is that we are worse off than we were, but also that we are back where we were ten years ago, so no worse off than we used to be. Maybe we can just conclude that ‘No Harm, No Foul’ is the applicable judgment. And, with Obama, we can be ‘Looking Forward, Not Backwards.’ If only I was sure where the ball actually is. Or was. Or even will be.

Fair Water

The April All Point Bulletin has brought us the new developments in troublesome trash collection and wandering water access. To remind: the current trash licensee says he can’t pick up recycling at the current rates and the county says he has to pickup recycling. Last month the County had provided mediation between the licensee and some local people unhappy with the situation. This month, the state decided it wanted to run things. So the state commission is now ‘conducting discovery’ and the county guy says maybe by fall there will be some decisions. I know that a lot of people have strong feelings about this, but it can't be the hardest issue in governance that the county or state has ever faced. But, if this is the way things go here, we can surely be more appreciative of why the trash isn’t picked up in Baghdad (or probably in Kabul) either.

The water problem is decided of course. There wasn’t enough water so they spent 18 months or so figuring out how to get more water (building a new storage tank) and how to raise the water rates to pay for the new tank. Then somebody decided there was an error in the planning somewhere and there was plenty of water without a new storage tank, and why not just keep the new water rate prices because there was some maintenance (replacing the pipes) that needed to be done anyway.

But there are people unhappy with the new rates and unclear why they are still there given the disappearance of the water storage tank needs and the likelihood that a new storage tank and new pipes are not interchangeable projects from a financial perspective. But what people got into the newspaper about was not so much that as that the water rates are ‘unfair.’ The headline is “WATER RATES DESCRIBED AS UNFAIR.’ I like that journalistic objectivity. They may be, they may not be: we’re just reporting what is said.

But, it is really hard to know what, exactly would constitute a fair water rate. Fairness is a tricky concept and I seem to have spent most of my life hearing people telling me about one thing or another that “life is not fair.” So if life is not fair, why would we be thinking that it mattered whether the water rates were unfair?

Nevertheless, this concern caused me to spend the last few days trying to figure out what a just water rate would be, since I have no idea what a fair rate would be (other than one that the unhappy people are willing to pay, which is more about economic ideas than about philosophical ones). The major issues here are that lots of people (mostly Canadians) don’t use any water most of the year because they aren’t here. But they don’t disconnect their water service because getting a meter connected now costs something like $7,500. So they don’t use water but they pay for the water they don’t use. A second concern is that some people use more water than others, even among those who are equally present at any moment, because there are more people in the household, for example. These people think/feel that the base allotment ought to provide more water. That is, it should be enough water for a family of four rather than for a family of two. Unfortunately, what that amount would be is not entirely clear. What you do get is almost 4,000 gallons every two months for $53.

My only real conclusion though is that we should be thinking about two rates: the first one would be the cost of just having a faucet in your house, whether you use water or not. That cost everyone ought to pay equally. If that amount were separated from the use-of-water rate, there’d be less to argue about. And water might not seem so expensive. The way the water bill looks leads consumers to think that they’re just paying for water. But they’re also paying for having a water system. Two things: water system and water. More transparency would help.

Detritus

Trash is on our minds again these days. According to the local paper, the most distressed parties to the current recycling/trash collection distress in Point Roberts are engaged in a mediation intervention under the guidance of a judge. And the parties would, I think, be Arthur (who is the current possessor of the trash/recycling license), the three P.R. complainants, and the County itself.

Arthur, I think, wants everyone in Pt. Roberts to have to be a part of the trash/recycling service. (Currently, it is dealer’s choice, and not enough of the dealers are choosing to be part of it.) The complainants want the County to take away Arthur’s license to handle the trash/recycling and, further, to award it instead to someone who will provide curbside recycling regardless of the universality of membership in that club. And the County, it would appear, just wishes that the whole thing would go away without its having to alter the ordinance that does not permit requiring everybody to participate monetarily in trash/recycling in rural areas. If the mediation doesn’t lead to something agreeable to the three parties, then the WUTC (the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission) will take the matter in hand later in the spring.

As it happens, we went out to the trash/recycling center (which is called either The Transfer Station or The Dump) to deliver unto it a large quantity of recycling that we had been gathering up over the weeks and months since Arthur’s company had ceased picking it up (on a bi-weekly basis). Plastic bottles, glass, tin cans, paper and cardboard are the stuff of recycling in this venue. I hadn’t been out there for several years and it had changed a lot. I don’t remember, actually, what it used to look like, but I don’t remember it looking like it currently does.

What you have is a large yard with abandoned refrigerators lined up on one side, and dumpsters of various sizes located in the center. You drive up a ramp arrangement and park your car. Then you take your recycling (or whatever you are taking to them) and put it in the appropriate area/container. The recyclables are in one area, and everything else is also in the central area slightly separated from the recycling part. There are signs explaining what goes where and how what is to be rendered before it goes where. The paper goes here, and the cardboard goes there, and the plastic bottles/tin cans/glass containers are dropped over the edge into a large dumpster. The sign says that the plastic bottles must have necks and that the plastic bottles must not have lids and that the plastic bottles must be flattened. The glass containers and the tin cans go in as God made them.

However, as you can see from the photo, the plastic bottles are often not flattened and their lids are still with them, the cardboard is not glass, metal, or plastic and thus is erroneously dumped: here, as in everywhere that humans function, directions are intended only for those who care about directions, a small and tedious bunch of people, one might assume.

More sorrowful than that, though, was the very sight of it all. As with the making of sausage and laws: you’ve got to see it happen before you can really know how much of a fan you want to be of the product. I remember suggesting to people who drink and drive about the advisability of spending a little late evening time in an urban emergency room before they pursue that activity. Just seeing all this stuff, all those refrigerators, all these bottles and cans and things, all this detritus. Not an uplifting sight with respect to the makers of all this after-material.

Two thoughts: (1) It’s not a particularly pleasant experience going to the dump and adding to the mass of material, but maybe that’s a good thing, in that it requires us, just a bit, to see what the dark side of a consumptive life looks like; and (2) It’s not a particularly pleasant experience but, as with pumping my own gasoline, I suppose I could get used to it.

An Unhappy New Year Already

Ready for a Happy New Year, I picked up the new issue of the All Point Bulletin to enjoy its annual recap of ‘the year that was.’ This is a nice tradition of small town newspapers in lots of places: the first issue of the year goes back and gathers up the last year’s important events, reminding readers of what they just went through. Since it is all in the past, there are no sudden shocks. There are good things and bad things to be reminded of, but it’s all familiar. There is a lot to be said for familiarity, just as there is a lot to be said for kindness and civility.

To my surprise, the front page of the Bulletin included, in addition to the year’s month by month reminiscences, a new item. Oh, shoot, no fun here. In the ongoing saga of recycling that we are engaged by and in, here in Point Roberts, a new shot has been fired across the bow. Ouch!

It is reported that a trio of locals has filed a complaint with the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission demanding that the Commission (1) pull the permit of the current P.R. refuse and recycling company, (2) that it forbid the County from permitting any varying accommodation for recycling in Point Roberts, and (3) that a lot of penalties be assessed. It’s a document prepared by a lawyer, so it has a lot of that legalistic language that kind of sounds like the heart of the issue is that people are feeding babies poison candy. Not the fault of the complainants, of course; just the nature of the law and its mode of communicating. Nevertheless, reading the complaint makes it sound like it’s a pretty alarming issue. It’s full of accusations like abuse of the public trust, and lack of duty to the community and disingenuous and untrustworthy behavior and systematic manipulation of facts and law, not to mention threats and fear-mongering.

Pretty amazing: all that right here in little downtown Point Roberts.

It’s not clear to me why this issue has become so heated, but I would guess that the underlying fear is revealed in the final sentences of the complaint:

This matter . . . leaves the Point Roberts community facing a slippery slope toward the potential degradation or elimination of other essential services the community deserve. We should be able to enjoy the same level of service as other citizens of Whatcom County, be equally able to fulfill our duties toward environmental protection and effective waste management, and not be discriminated against because of our location.

We are about to watch the dominoes fall, I guess. Today it’s curbside recycling, tomorrow it’s water and power. Next year, they'll be taking my street away. Somehow, I just don’t feel that worried. ‘Terrible things could happen,’ isn’t really a very persuasive or reasoned claim in the absence of any evidence of likelihood of ‘terrible things happening.’

We need to be treated just like everybody else in Whatcom County, on the other hand, is a claim about equity. But it’s not a very strong one. I lived through years of children telling me that everybody had to get exactly the same thing or ‘it’s not fair.’ Any parent knows the ‘it’s not fair’ claim is usually bogus. In most circumstances, we are better off figuring out exactly what works best in specific contexts, not forcing everyone into the same Procrustean allotment. I would strongly argue that, in most civic service provision, the weirdness of Point Roberts’ location means that solutions that work easily in the rest of the state might not work here and something individualized needs to be worked out. Additionally, its important to remember that differences matter and that difference is not the same as discrimination. In fact, Point Roberts just received a lot of public funding for 150 acres of public preservation at Lily Point. Is government ‘discriminating’ against every other 5 square miles of Washington state if it doesn’t provide them with an equal park?

I may be prejudiced in this matter because up in Roberts Creek, we used to have curbside recycling, just as we used to have it here in Point Roberts, but it didn’t work from an economic perspective (just as it probably won’t work here), so now it’s self-haul and for the past 10 years, that’s worked fine. But, of course, they're Canadians.

If you want to read the complaint, you can find it here.

Then you need to find the complaint document (the third item on the list), which is Docket #082129 ‘complaint.doc ID: 346AOE’ You just click on it and it will come up as a Word document.

Recycling Remnants

There are a lot of small and large pieces of fabric sitting around in Canadian and U.S. houses. Not just the fabric that is in dresses and sheets and upholstery, but loose pieces. Some eyelet that someone bought once to make a baby bonnet but never got around to actually making and now the baby for whom it was intended is graduating from college; some remnants from a beach cover-up that was made of fabric too cute to throw away, and even though the cover-up was eventually cast off, the remnants remain in a drawer. A fancy fabric piece from a South Pacific vacation. That kind of thing. If you are a quilter, people eventually give you this fabric. And if you are a quilter, you accept it because it’s absolutely possible that someday you will need it, even if that day is far in the future.

If you are a quilter known to use unusual bits and pieces of fabric in a quilt (as I am), then even other quilters give you fabric. It is the fabric that they can’t imagine ever using themselves, so it tends toward the unusual and the exotic and the not-cotton or not dress-weight anyway. And you accept it because you are doing them a favor taking it off of their hands and it is always possible that some day…etc.

In just that way, I have acquired left-over stretch bathing suit fabric, fiber-glass screen, indigo blue landscaping/shade cloth, many and varied pieces of silk and satin and lace and velvet and velveteen, and an entire large paper sack full of excess prom dress or fairy costume materials (not obvious which). Costumers for theatre companies send me small boxes of fancy costume stuff. There is no end to it and I have many boxes of it in my workshop, nicely labeled as ‘Exotics’ or ‘SILK/SATIN’ or ‘Miscellaneous.’

One of the largest caches of such fabric comes from interior decorators or friends of interior decorators. Apparently, the decorator fabric companies put out new lines regularly and send sample books to two or three million interior decorator stores or free-lancers. Then, when their next line comes out, they send out another two or three million, and the previous sample books get given to me. Sometimes, especially if they are elaborate prints, the samples can be quite large and in that case, they can be quite useful. Mostly, however, they are small, emphasizing texture more than design, and then a sample book may be around 6”x10”, and not so useful. A sample book can contain 20-30 different pieces or, more likely, slight variants of the same piece. Each sample has a heavy and permanently-glued paper label that covers about one-fifth of its surface, further rendering this fabric not so useful.

Nevertheless, I and many of my quilter friends have entire boxes of these things. Beautiful fabric, beautifully designed. Must be useful for something.

Today, I spent about five minutes looking at them, trying to figure out some better, higher use. I had actually been using them to make disposable booklets for an Art Walk in which we are participating in Point Roberts next week. In my five minutes of thinking, however, I figured that if I doubled the samples, used rag bond for the inside paper, and ribbons to protect the central paper seam, I would have a very classy little blank book. Which would take me about ten minutes to make.

So now I’ve found a super use for all these small fabric samples. If only I had a super use for large numbers of very classy little fabric covered books with high-quality, blank paper pages.