Homeowners' Meeting In the New Subdivision

I don't care what color you are, you know, I just don't like seeing a bunch of teenagers just roaming around the neighborhood.  Where are their parents at?

That bus they put in - that can just drop off people from anywhere.  Any part of the city, and they're coming in to our community to cause trouble.

I used to rent myself, but these renters here, especially these section 8 renters - they don't care.  We need to change the covenants to outlaw that.  [Someone points out this is against federal law, which prohibits discrimination against the rental assistance program].  Well, we should make it more difficult at least.

We have to stop all of these loud cars.  This kid has a huge speaker in his back window.  Where are his parents?

Add general nods of agreement. It's Wednesday night at the public library auditorium, and we are in a Homeowner's Association meeting.  I've related the quotes above, from different homeowners in our neighborhood, to several friends who come from around the country, and they all cringe. They are thinking, this is the bad part of the south-haven't we moved past this?

However, the speakers above are all African American.  Does that change your perception?  This causes surprise when someone hears those quotes.  Our community is mostly African American, and the attendance at the meeting was a couple of dozen or so black people and me and another white guy or two, representative of the makeup of the community.  Durham is somewhat rare in that blacks and whites are roughly balanced within city limits, although individual neighborhoods vary widely.

Nobody is for locking up teenagers, keeping poor people from getting transportation, or disallowing people to have an affordable place to rent.  But people are entitled to the "quiet enjoyment" of their property, as the law puts it.  So if a group appears to stand in the way, it can become us versus them, regardless of race.  And statistically, teenagers and renters care less about their properties (it's not entirely theirs) and maybe less about quiet enjoyment. Racism is still alive, but class distinctions are becoming more important as more African Americans are lifted into the upper class.  "White flight" is deemed a symptom of racism, but "black flight" happens too. Witness the large concentration of African Americans staying away from Washington, DC city limits by moving over the border to Maryland.

We didn't come to any conclusions.  It didn't entirely matter because we are mostly powerless.  We discovered, to my big surprise, that the Board of Directors of the Homeowner's Association, is actually one guy, Jerry Stoltz.  He's the developer that started things 13 years and has refused to turn over the board of one to an actual board of homeowners even though it appears the legal requirements have been met (it's common for the developer to direct the board in the beginning stages of a community).  Disenfranchising a black community is not a good thing to do, so he was the punching bag for tonight.  The meeting was scheduled so he could be present, but he begged off at 9 am and instead sent Drew, who would only call himself a professional acquaintance of Jerry's.  His only ability was to take notes.  He had no answers nor authority.  But anger at the builder was another issue that surfaced harshly in the mostly white HOA where we lived in South Durham.  Crime is also a major concern in both areas.  I think both neighborhoods are safe, but getting everyone together to relay their worst experiences makes everyone feel less safe.

In the end, I don't know if we could really change things if we were in charge.  People are behind on their HOA dues by $40,000, so we can't really spend much money.  Bankruptcy and foreclosure mean we may never see a lot of that.  When we are the board, we will have we  to blame.

Another issue I contemplated:
Should I ask about a starting a neighborhood e-mail list?  You know, to bring the community together?  Or because of the tone created by the false anonymity of e-mailing your neighbors instead of talking to them, would it actually tear the neighborhood apart?  I've definitely seen both results.  It certainly gives people a platform for complaining: "We will initiate action if everyone does not power-wash his home," etc.  But hopefully, it could be a platform for organizing neighborhood cookouts, too. Someone else seizes the initiative and I sign up.  We'll see.

Stuff My Neighborhood Listserv Says

What's a neighborhood without an e-mail list to connect it?  Rusty joined the list of one neighborhood near downtown Durham, and it is amazing what is shared and what is argued.  Here's a sampling [emphasis mine]

• This neighborhood likes to share:

Sender: [redacted]@duke.edu
Subject: kroger coupons i won't use

going out to the curb at 1:30pm today
[redacted] englewood
please take only the ones you'll useand please don't take the clothespinsave $1 on any 1 listerine 1 liter or larger
save 40cents on 1 kroger graham crackers
save $2 on any nivea body product
save $2.75 on any one charmin 30 double roll
save $1.50 on any 1 brita filter
all expire apr 17
all good only at kroger
you pay sales tax
technically "void if transferred" but an employee told me off the record that's not enforced

• How can you piece together a life from which these items were necessary but no longer are?

Sender: [redacted]@mindspring.com
Subject: Free stuff to a good home
Dinosaur bathtub sprayer and hose. Fits onto a traditional style bathtub faucet and the spray comes out the dinosaur's mouth. Very cute, and functional, too! [how does this fit with the next item?]
Tools to assist someone with limited mobility or reach - a long shoe horn, a picker-upper, a very long handled bath sponge, stuff like that left over from knee surgery and mostly never used. Take it all.

Backpack suitcase - a little too large for my need.
An opened and partially used package of disposable underpads. Perfect for the old dog that's a little leaky.

Almost new Bioset sprout maker with instructions.
Learn Italian cassette tapes.

An hour and a half later, we are informed "still have underpads, the rest is gone."  You have to be quick in this neighborhood.

Hendersonville ER

The important stuff: Lara is now fine, and not yellow.  A few weeks ago, we were visiting friends in Asheville.  It was great to see friends who now live several hours away.  It was relaxed.  Lara took an afternoon nap.  She woke up jaundiced.  She looked like she had a bad spray tan - $50 of spray with 50 cents of training for the operator.

These are some observations take while waiting on her to get a diagnosis and get well.

We have been trained to call the insurance nurses' line, then go to the urgent care doctor, and then lastly the ER.  The urgent care people (literally) looked at her and said, "You need to go to the ER." So we ended up in Pardee Hospital in Hendersonville, where the urgent care center was open later in the day, instead of Asheville, where all of our friends were.  The eventual diagnosis was medication induced liver damage.  It was temporary damage and started clearing up when she stopped taking liver-metabolized medicines.  It's rare, but we are lucky that way.

Hendersonville, NC is the not the same as Henderson, NC.  -Ville is near TN and -- is near VA.  Lara says it is the Durham of Asheville. I don't know for sure if that is a complement to either.

Upon entry to the ER, we are asked if we have a pocket-knife or weapon on us.  Our version of this question at Durham Regional is a metal detector.  When I point this out to the nurse, she says that would be a good idea, but she is required to ask the question even though she acknowledges the silliness of it.  This sounds like the product of a special sub-committee on regional hospital security coming up with a 5-part plan to improve safety while using no resources (excepting the considerables costs of the committee itself).  However, she said it actually prompted one woman to turn over a gun, peacefully.  Security retrieved it. I don't know if you would get in trouble if you turned the weapon over when asked for it.

Lara gets her IV successfully inserted on the third try while the background music is playing "Stayin' Alive." This seems like a good sign for health.

Many of the people in the ER waiting room know each other. This includes the janitor, who has a long conversation with a patient.

At 1 AM, 10 hours after my last meal, that 24-hour Krispy Kreme by the interstate is calling my name. It's only five or ten minutes away, but the essence of ER waiting is not knowing if the next fifteen minutes will be mind numbingly boring and a good time for chores

It's was supposed to an acceptable wait time when we checked, but 3 or 4 ambulances came in, including a car accident.  A girl whose Mom was in a wreck was sobbing in the waiting room.  The last time we passed by, she seemed to be doing better, so I hope her Mom is okay.  It looked like she came from a play, so it was hard to do that ignore her pain to give some level of privacy in a full waiting room.  Lara said the dress of the very white girl looked Indian (Mumbai Indian not Oklahoma Indian - is there a good way to more easily clarify that?), not a sarhi but still Indian.  She watches the Bollywood movies while I can't stand to be in the room while they are playing, so I'll have to trust her.


When it seems like we might be here longer than we expected and our carpool buddy needs to go home, I started looking up rental cars. What else to do?  Avis.com is down for maintenance.  It's midnight, but who goes down at midnight Eastern Time?  That not really wise for all of the Californians who are awake then.  Switching to a California-routed Internet connection didn't help, so I guess people don't book cars on a Saturday night.  The next day I am able to contribute my knowledge of car rental rates to friends who start researching them again to figure out how to get home.

I figured out how to watch the OU game in the waiting room. It wasn't online, but my computer in Durham picks up the antenna signals of ABC there, and it sent the broadcast to my laptop in Hendersonville.  It was my first real outside of the home use of the streaming capability from orb.com, which lets you take videos and broadcasts from your TV card on your home computer and watch them somewhere else.  Our Internet connection does not have the fastest upload speed, so it was blurry, but it worked!  A victory for the evening.  After we got to a room, I continued watching on the laptop for a while before noticing the small TV up in the corner.  It got better reception, but the game got worse.  We lost, but losing is a distraction.

We first get taken up to the third floor.  Lara gets in the bed, and the nurse looks at her and says, "You're not an 80 year old named Edna."  We move down to the second floor where we are really supposed to be.  Earlier in the night, someone came to the admissions desk looking for part of another's patient's chart.  The nurse handed her Lara's chart because "this one looks pretty thick."  The missing information was located and removed to the proper chart.  Problem averted (did the missing sheet ask for 16 rabies shots to be administered?).  And a doctor asked about her prior gall bladder removal.  She still has a gall bladder.  It turns out doing some imaging tests differently fails to pick it out on the scan.  Medicine's not perfect.

The nurse and nurse's aide on the floor are very friendly.  The doctor on the floor is the nurse's family doctor.  Again, everybody knows everybody.  The nurse's aide very much wants to give everybody a hot blanket.  They are nice and warm, like those hot towels they give you at nice restaurants (or at least I see them giving to people in nice restaurants on TV).  Lara refused the towel.  I eventually felt obliged to take it after he switched out my chair for a recliner.


It's a little warm in the room.  They bring us a small fan.  The nurse's aide is very happy that it is complimentary and that we get to keep it.  It makes me happy too, at 4:30 am.  Apparently, once they open the fan box, it's not sanitary to use it on another patient.  This is a little strange since toilet seats are constantly reused. I guess toilets bleach clean while fans do not. I'm not complaining. The insurance company is buying thousands of dollars for this, so I'm glad to have a souvenir.

There's a nurse on the second shift called the vampire.  I thought this was insulting, but it turns out that she is really good at putting in an IV needle.  This part of the experience can be quick  and easy or long, miserable, and memorable if it takes multiple sticks.

The place is flooded with senior volunteers.  They serve at the nice cafe, take you in a wheelchair to your card, and provide free valet parking (nice but not  perfect- overheard: "This is you car, right? Sometimes we get the wrong one.")  Our friends also volunteered heavily with lots of visits and a lot of driving to help us keep a car while Sarah returned to Durham (thank you Brett!).

Lara emerged with her lab tests going in the right direction and looking better.  But when we stop at the CVS, the pharmacist asked, "Are you having liver trouble?"

I summed up our three day adventure in an e-mail to friends:
We've been a little bored although it's part marriage retreat, spending almost all of the day in a small room two feet next to each other.  It's a good marriage, so it's a good retreat:)

Who Does Google Think I am?

For the record: I love the ladies, my lady in particular.  She would not love it if I were to help another lady with her pregnancy pledge to create yet another little lady.  My love of the ladies is from a distance - I don't want to be a lady or sound like one. [To be PC, every word in that sentence should have a footnote of "Not there's anything wrong with that."]

Google targets its text ads based on the content of your e-mails.  Facebook does similar things, based on your profile interests.  FB advertisers can target people who like a particular sports team, based on on demographic data they have collected on those fans.  Google's automated practice of reading your mail would probably result in a privacy panic if other companies did it, but we trust Google.

First there was the targeted Google Ad for fairfaxcryobank.com with the Pregnancy Pledge, where I could price myself genetically and then apply to contribute genetically to furtherance of the species.  Or maybe they thought I was the woman who wanted the "vials," which gets us to:

I just got the text ad "Transgender Voice Surgery - YesonVC.net - Travel To Korea For Cutting Edge Voice Feminization."  Not my thing.  Not really physically possible, I think.  I would be their great white male whale.  My voice would have to go up four octaves.  Maybe I'm wavering when I think of it.  Two octaves could enable me to speak at a normal volume.  Imagine the bass on the car of a guy who has the entire value of what would be his 401K installed as hardware in his car.  My head resonates with itself like that bass.  So anyway, my voice sounds loud to me.  But it also sounds male, and for a guy who can barely do one pull up, the little things take a difference.

I still remember a friend's horror as a teenager, as he described receiving some sample feminine products in the mail because some database decided he was female.  He threw them in his sister's room and ran.

We're fragile, Google.  Respect our masculinity.

The Wall Street Journal just did a long series on how web sites collect huge amounts of data and cross reference it with more data to effectively target consumers.  If they know what they are doing then I don't know me.  Or if I do know me (and I spend a fair amount of time with me), I have effectively created a privacy shield so dense that no marketer can truly apprehend me.  If I weren't me, I would pay to be me.  It would be a monthly fee to someone who would keep the Z-list paparazzi out of my life. 

In the end, I'm sure I'm making it worse by clicking on all of these weird ads to find out what's going on.

Fire Safety

It's time to update those fire stickers on windows for present-day sentiments.  The International Global DanPark Labs has developed such a notice to help firefighters save what is most dear to us. Slap this is on your window and the fire department will know your priorities.

Quick Pics From the Trip

We haven't had a lot of wireless opportunities, but here are some picture before we start to head home tomorrow.

Sandy Neck  Beach, MA

Rhode Island parks don't have free showers or correct punctuation.

In Rhode Island, the rain got inside the tent.

Waterfire in Providence, RI. Wooden fires are started on platforms up and down the river.