Bicycle
Washington, DC
Aug 22, 2008

Limping Man
Washington, DC
Aug 22, 2008

C & O Canal, Georgetown
Washington, DC
Aug 22, 2008

Morning Sailboat & Dock
Fort Hill, PA
Aug 5, 2008

Woods at Chicken Hawk Highway
Fort Hill, PA
Aug 6, 2008

Hoses
Washington, DC
Aug 20, 2008

B at the River
Ohiopyle, PA
Aug 7, 2008

Chopper
Washington, DC
Aug 22, 2008

Deer Valley Field
Fort Hill, PA
Aug 7, 2008

K & K on the T Dock
Fort Hill, PA
Aug 7, 2008

Oh, pretty summer flowers. Some from a lovely garden in Connecticut, some from my back yard, and some from the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Here’s a fabulous recipe for granola, from Sarah Leah Chase’s Nantucket Open-House Cookbook, with my notes in brackets:

Homemade Granola

9 cups old-fashioned rolled oats [1 1/3 box]
4 c shredded coconut [one bag - sweetened is fine]
1 1/2 cups whole hazelnuts [You can vary the nuts. I have used all sliced almonds, part almonds & part pecans, chopped instead of whole hazelnuts, etc.]
1 1/2 cups slivered or sliced almonds
3/4 cup honey
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1 cup golden raisins
1 cup dark raisins
1/2 cup chopped dates (optional) [I’ve never added these.]

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. [I have had better luck at 350 degrees. Depends on your oven.]

2. Toss the oats, coconut, hazelnuts, and almonds together in a 13 x 9-inch baking pan. [Do it in a large bowl. Plus, you will need an 18 x 13-inch baking pan or two 13 x 9-inch baking pans, not one, for baking.]

3. Whisk the honey and oil together in a small bowl. [You need a medium size bowl.] Pour over the oat mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until all the oats and nuts are coated. [Hands work a lot better.]

4. Bake, stirring occasionally with the wooden spoon, until the mixture turns a nice even golden brown, 35 to 45 minutes. [Sometimes it only takes 15 minutes, so pay attention. A spatula works better for turning the granola. Also, stir and turn it over every 5 minutes from the beginning and every 2 minutes once it starts to brown. You don’t want it to burn or get too brown.]

5. Remove the granola from the oven and stir constantly to aerate the mixture and keep it from sticking together, until the granola is cool. Stir in the golden and dark raisins and the dates, if using. Other diced fruits, such as apricots, figs, and prunes, can be added or substituted if you want. [Apricots get too hard after it’s been stored a day or two.] Store the granola in an airtight glass canister or tightly wrapped earthenware bowl. [Will keep quite a while.]

Makes about 18 cups. [This is a lot. You can halve this recipe and still get a lot.]

I like to eat this plain or mixed with plain yogurt. It’s pretty sweet and definitely not low-fat, but it’s YUMMY!

Two weeks ago, my youngest child left home. Off to a summer job at camp, then to college. Since then, besides working some fiendish hours at my job, accomplishing weekend errands and chores, and terracing and planting my side yard, I’ve done some things I probably wouldn’t have done but for the empty nest:

• Had a beer and a Nats Dog at a baseball game
• Got to know a couple of people at a neighbor’s party
• Listened to Moondi Klein, Jimmy Gautreau, Mike Auldridge, John Starling, and Emmylou Harris in concert
• Ate crackers and cheese for dinner several nights in a row
• Muddled mint and lime for a mojito
• Listened to Caribbean jazz in the rain in the Sculpture Garden
• Enjoyed several interesting meals at restaurants I’d never been to
• Had my first pedicure
• Signed up for more Lindy Hop lessons

Not a bad start.

My graduate thesis is finally finished. Here’s what it’s about:

ABSTRACT

The competitiveness of a business providing services rather than goods rests on whether its customers perceive the services to be of good quality. Among the factors that strongly influence the perception of service quality is the interior environment of the place in which services are received.
The author reviews several lines of business-based research that examine how the interior environment affects customers’ perceptions of service quality, proposes a model synthesizing this research into seven primary influences on the perception of service quality – functional, temporal, physical, ambient, psychological, indicative, and social – and discusses the role that design of the interior environment plays in each of these influences. The concepts discussed in this paper are of significance to business because they demonstrate the value of design in a business setting and to the interior design profession because they expand the interior design body of knowledge beyond the confines of design-based research.

Click here to read it.

Hooray!

Rachel at Cre8d Design fixed my website! If you need help with your website, give her a nod.

Fast Company almost always gives me something interesting to chew on. In its December 2007/January 2008 issue, the magazine presents its 2008 Social Capitalist Awards. In his article covering the awards, Keith Hammonds talks about how promoting social good is no longer the sole province of non-profit organizations. He applauds a number of endeavors attempting to integrate financial returns with social good, calling them “for-benefit” companies. The enterprises he praises yield market returns, but don’t make profit their top priority - instead they put environment and people at the top of the list. Among the recipients of the Social Capitalist Awards are firms that facilitate micro-loans, teams that work with disadvantaged children to distribute books or further their educational opportunities, and organizations that provide housing and other services to homeless and disabled people.

For-profits are also getting in on the action. One of the for-profit organizations identified as having a strong social purpose is Herman Miller, a large manufacturer of office furniture. Herman Miller has a “design for the environment” philosophy aimed at creating no operational environmental impact by 2020. Make no mistake, Herman Miller makes money, and if they can do it environmentally, so can other corporations. Why is this important? With resources dwindling and environmental problems increasing, we’ll eventually run out of raw materials and our fouling of the environment will reach untenable levels. There is clearly a long-term connection between social good and corporate success and the prevailing focus on short-term profit at the expense of long term social issues will ultimately fail. Companies figuring out how to reuse materials and cut their pollution now will be ready.

Used to be only non-profits tackled social issues and they struggled with low funding, lack of clout, and transient leadership, with the result that much of what actually got done was talk. For-profits occasionally launched social initiatives, but mostly they were beholden to their shareholders’ demands for maximum profit at any environmental cost. Things appear to be changing. Now some for-profits are making social good a core value and still profiting. Non-profits appear to be adopting capitalist dynamics in ways that make them more effective in accomplishing their missions. The appearance of a new level of organizations with values falling somewhere in between widens the possibilities and presents terrific new opportunities for creative but achievable solutions. I join Fast Company in applauding these organizations.

So, suppose I wanted to write an autobiography. Where would I start? With my own birth? With my parents? Grandparents? So much affects who I am but the stories in my head are limited - only second hand accounts of the last two generations and a failing memory of my own experiences.

I was born in 1949, the first child from a union between a WWII Navy officer and a society girl from Houston. My father’s father had come from Germany in 1848. My mother’s family had been in this country for a long time. They met in Houston, where my father lived briefly before the war with his brother, a contractor, helping design houses. It was a time of debutant parties and tennis matches and my mother said my father, a terrific dancer, was flirtatious and handsome.

My mother was the last of 5 children, the other four considerably older than she. She was raised by nursemaids and had audiences with her parents rather than loving interactions. When I was growing up, my parents always said, “Children are to be seen and not heard.” This notion was apparently the child-raising maxim of the pre-war era, and it certainly trickled down to my psyche.

My father was the baby of a family of 6, his closest sibling being 10 years older than he. His mother was 45 and his father 65 when he was born, and my sense is that he learned to expect to get whatever he wanted. This also trickled down to my psyche.

How these things affected me is something I think about from time to time. Sometime I can see it clearly, but other times I’m sure I act how I act without even being aware of it. We humans feel so smart, knowledgeable, capable, but we are really rather unaware and imprecise.

How does one do something autobiographical? Chronologically? Interrelationally? Randomly? Who would even care to read it? The beauty of a blog is it doesn’t much matter. This is supposed to be a design blog, but what the heck. Perhaps I’ll add a little autoblog.

When I was in my 20s, my friend Mark and I had went back to the land, settling on a 20-acre plot in north Idaho. To make ends meet, when summer ended we left our little utopia to find jobs. One year we went to Missouri to work as field hands in my parent’s apple orchard. Our job was to prop up the fruit-laden branches to keep them from breaking under the weight of the ripening apples and, as we walked from tree to tree, we saw vast black flocks of birds migrating south across the river, heard the song of the autumn cicadas in the unmown grass, and smelled the fragrance of the sweet apples as they ripened to juicy perfection. Overly poetic perhaps, but the experience made me an environmentalist.

Now I’m a designer and I’m still passionate about how we treat our environment. Sometimes it feels as if I’m too small to do anything that might help, but I do what I can, and right now I’m studying for the LEED exam. Some of the others studying with me confess to being overwhelmed and baffled by the material, but it comes fairly naturally to me. Although I know there is disagreement about whether LEED is the most effective way to encourage sustainable building, the rating system has good intent and I applaud it. Perhaps it’s not perfect, but it’s a start and I want to learn the system and teach my clients.

I’d like to think that if enough of us designers learn all we can about the need for sustainable design, we can eventually turn our clients’ heads and, perhaps over time, the message will spread and become part of the way business is done. We need it. The cicadas still emerge, but I’ve noticed that the endless skies of birds are gone and the apples are largely tasteless. I don’t know if we can get them back, but we have to try.

Caroline Hax (who I think is very astute) responded in today’s column (Washington Post, Sunday, November 4, 2007, p. M2, col. 3) to a reader’s question with an observation that gave me one of those “oh, yeah” moments. The question, like most of the ones she answers, dealt with relationships. She says, “There is a general power structure to dating. Even when the ultimate goal is commitment, the person who asks someone out [and here she admits she is talking generally about men] has, roughly speaking, two intermediate goals: getting sex and avoiding humiliation.” She then says, “Once a woman commits to a man . . . the power shifts. Now it’s her turn to fear humiliation.” [Pause] . . . Of course. That’s exactly what’s so terrifying about relationships.

Humiliation. You feel it if you think you’re in love and he only wants benefits. You feel it when your middle-aged spouse runs off with a 20-something bleached blond. You feel it when you get all flustered if someone of the opposite sex even talks to you, it’s been so long. It’s a feeling to be avoided at all cost.

But, avoiding something at all cost means there is a cost and how do you tell if the cost is too high? How do you balance the almost certain humiliation that will occur at some time or another in a relationship with the benefits that the relationship might afford? How do you let the humiliation and the fear slide off your back and not turn you into a hermit? Can you get over it?

I have answers to most things (right or wrong), but not this one. Still, it seems like some sort of breakthrough to have a concept to mull over. Maybe understanding what is so terrifying is a good start for a change.