Another Year In Cities

Continuing a tradition I began last year, here are the cities I visited in 2009 and stayed in for at least one night:

• Albuquerque, NM
• Show Low, AZ
• Winslow, AZ
• Flagstaff, AZ
• Cortez, CO
• Blanding, UT
• Bicknell, UT
• Kanab, UT
• St. George, UT
• Las Vegas, NV
• Lone Pine, CA
• Bishop, CA
• Carson City, NV
• Reno, NV
• Santa Cruz, CA
• Barstow, CA
• Philadelphia, PA
• Roswell, NM
• Austin, TX
• Houston, TX
• Highland Park, NJ
• Kayenta, AZ

Once again, this list doesn’t include truly rural areas like Chaco, although some of the places on the list are quite small.  It also includes each place just once, in order of my first visit there during the year.

Clearly, I visited a lot more cities this year than last, mostly on my big road trip in February and March.  I’m pretty happy with that.

For Posterity

My mom just bought a machine that digitizes VHS tapes and uploads them to a computer, so my big project over the break is to go through all our old home videos and digitize them.  We noticed a little while ago that some (but not all) of the older ones are starting to deteriorate, so the main goal here is to preserve what’s left while we still can, but it will also make it a lot easier to watch and distribute the videos once we burn them to DVD.  It’s mostly the audio that’s going at this point, and even that is only on a few, so it looks like this will be pretty successful.  It’s certainly been interesting for me to look at these old tapes.

Most of them are just informal home videos of me and my sister when we were little kids, but there are a few that contain information of more general historical interest, including an interview with my dad that was done as part of an oral history project by the United Indian Traders Association for its archive at Northern Arizona University.  Anyway, it’s interesting stuff, and I think it’ll be a useful way for me to occupy my time while I’m on break.

Leading The Recovery

Albuquerque is one of the first cities to return to pre-recession output levels?  Sounds good, I guess, especially since I’m heading back there in a couple of days.  As for what the cities on the list have in common, just at a glance I’d say “high levels of federal spending per capita” probably accounts for Albuquerque, Virginia Beach, and DC.  That explanation probably wouldn’t work for Austin and McAllen, although it might for San Antonio, but Texas has a tendency to follow its own economic rhythm, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to the rest of the country.  A look at the maps on the MetroMonitor website suggests that Texas is doing considerably better than the country as a whole across a wide range of economic indicators.

It’s Not About You

Via Yglesias, a very good Op-Ed about how climate change is all about collective action, not individual morality.  Lobbying the Senate to pass cap-and-trade is vastly more important than any amount of diminishing your individual “carbon footprint.”

First Snow

The weather’s been kind of weird here lately, going back and forth between cold and rainy and warm and clear.  Now it’s snowing pretty significantly, although it hasn’t begun to stick.  I’ve found it interesting being back in the Northeast and adjusting to the very different weather patterns after being in the Southwest for a while.

Interview

I had a job interview today (for this job).  It went okay, but I doubt I’ll get the job.  I probably wouldn’t have been the best fit for the job anyway.  I mostly just applied for it because I was so desperate for a job, and it’s not particularly closely related to my background or interests.  It also seems like the project is not yet clearly defined, so it’s not quite clear what sort of skills are going to be most important for the position.  Probably not my skills, though.

It’s kind of frustrating the way these jobs all seem to expect substantial relevant background and skills.  That’s the kind of stuff I came to grad school to learn.  It really puts people like me at a disadvantage relative to people who come in with a lot of related experience.  Which makes sense from the perspective of the people doing the hiring, of course, but it’s still frustrating.

I did see another position advertised right after I got out of the interview.  It looks a lot more like the kind of thing I’m interested in, so I applied for it.  No idea how likely it is that I’ll get it, but here’s hoping.

Living On Borrowed Money

So, remember how I was running out of money and desperately looking for a job?  Well, it turned out my financial aid exceeded my tuition and fees this semester, so I had a big refund check waiting for me at the student accounting office.  There was some mix-up with the paperwork, so I didn’t get it at the beginning of the semester like most people did, but I picked it up today and used it to open an account at the bank around the corner.  I’m still looking for a job, but this is plenty of money to live on while I do that, so it really takes the pressure off.  It’s all from my loans, of course, so it’s not exactly like I’ve earned any of this money, but I’m very willing at this point to kick that can a little further down the road.

Walkable Urbanism: Not Perfect

Like any self-respecting planning student, I am generally in favor of dense, walkable development, and I’m quite happy to be living in a town where I can easily walk to pretty much anything I need.  There definitely are disadvantages to this level of density, though, including a certain lack of privacy and an occasional feeling of being surrounded by people.  The latter may not be an issue for most people, but it gets to me from time to time.

Lately I’ve been dealing with a situation (hopefully now resolved) that really brings this home.  It seems that my downstairs neighbor, who has to get up early to go to work, can hear my rolling chair through her ceiling and it’s been keeping her up so late that she’s gotten way too little sleep in the month or so since she moved in.  I stay up really late, and I had no idea this was bothering her, so I’ve inadvertently been causing her problems for weeks now.  She finally told us about this a few days ago, and today we worked out what was causing the noise (my desk chair) and figured out a solution (I’ll switch to a different, non-rolling chair at night).

I think we’ve got the whole thing settled, but it’s a reminder that there are real costs to density and reasons that a lot of people like auto-oriented suburbs.  I still prefer the density, of course, but it’s a welcome reminder that urbanist evangelism needs to take these things into account.

Eleven

Matthew Yglesias has two good posts on Armistice Day and its problematic transformation into Veterans’ Day.  I think another way to look at the point he makes in the first post is that unlike many other countries, the US has never experienced a war that ended in a Pyrrhic victory.  This contributes to the extraordinarily simplistic way war and the military tend to be viewed in American public discourse.  The way a day commemorating the horrors of pointless war became a day honoring the military is a case in point.

Registered

For some reason registration for next semester began at 10:00 pm tonight.  The system was a little slow, presumably because of overcrowding by people anxious to get into their preferred classes before they filled up, but I got into mine with no trouble.  So that was nice.