Tag: adventures

A Bit More Urban Overhead for Summersault

New Summersault office entranceBecause you come here every day looking for blogging goodness, you've probably noticed that I've been a little quiet lately on that front.  This is in no small part due to the exciting adventure that has been moving my company's main office from the location we've occupied for ~9 years at 914 East Main Street in Richmond, to our new location at 710 East Main St, Suite 200 in Richmond.

The move brings with it a great expansion into a much more flexible and usable space, a whole new outlook on the world with natural light via second story windows, and a new beginning in the life of the company.  One of the tag-lines in our marketing materials is "World Class Services Without Urban Overhead."  Well, now we have a bit more urban overhead, and I thought I'd share a few notes and reflections on the move:

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My radio show on WECI

It's almost, but not quite, embarrassing to admit how much time I spent as a kid playing "Radio DJ" in my room.  I had a Fisher Price turntable along with a cassette deck hooked into a surprisingly advanced "be your own DJ" toy mixing device, and I would spin tunes for hours, paying particular attention the cross fades, the track notes announced in between songs, and faux news and weather reports to my non-existent listeners.  You create art for yourself regardless of whether someone else gets to view/hear it, right?

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Hospitality with WarmShowers.org

Cross Country StopoverThis past week I had my first experience hosting some cross-country cyclists for a night.  Quinn, Ken and Andy are biking from Portland, OR to New York, NY and came through Indiana, riding into Richmond on US-40.  I recently became the sole human occupant of a house with great space for hosting guests, and so I figured the least I could do is sign up for some opportunities to help out folks who find themselves on interesting journeys through the area.

WarmShowers.org is a resource for facilitating just that for cyclists, and it's a great way to find or offer lodging.  You can provide as much or as little information about your location and "amenities" as you want, and you're under no obligation to host anyone at any particular time.  It's similar to other resources like CouchSurfing.org or even Mennonite Your Way.

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Blog salad

P8200016Most of my blog posts are a main course dish with one primary taste.  This one is more of a salad with a bunch of different tastes thrown together.

I did eat a salad for lunch today (nice transition) - radish, green onion, and goat cheese on spring mix greens, with poppy seed dressing.  Everything but the dressing was grown/made at Abundant Acres Farm, the provider of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share that I bought this season.  Friends Kent and Dori have again done a great job making fresh, local, chemical-free food available, and I'm grateful for it.  I don't have a garden on my own land right now, but having a bag of garden-fresh stuff delivered to me every week is hard to beat.  There's still quite a gap between my ideals about where my food comes from and my actual diet.

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My political aspirations

Update March 2011: I'm currently a candidate for election to Richmond's City Council.

At a local business networking event tonight, someone noted that they'd heard a rumor I might be getting involved in politics locally.  We had a good conversation about it, and I thought I'd use it as a jumping off point to share a little more about my own political aspirations.

Sometime during my college experience, I decided that I was going to run for the Presidency of the United States of America.  I was mostly serious. I mean, I announced it on the Internet for crying out loud, so you know I wasn't just messing around.  I figured out that I would be old enough to be elected President in the 2012 elections, and I dreamed my dream from there.

I've since figured out that national politics is probably not for me, at least not anytime soon.

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Reflections on Transition Training in Bloomington

Bloomington, IN Transition Training ParticipantsI'm just back from a weekend-long gathering in Bloomington, Indiana, where I was joined by ~25 other fine folks for a "Transition Training" event.  The Transition US movement is part of a vibrant, international grassroots movement that builds community resilience in response to the challenges of peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis.  Today's edition of the New York Times Magazine had a cover story featuring the Transition movement, including one of the facilitators who I had the benefit of working with this weekend, Michael Brownlee.

A few thoughts on how it went, and what's next:

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Letting the land teach me who I am

Today I was honored to have two different speaking/interviewing events at Earlham College, both about my involvement in community building in Richmond.  In preparing, I returned to an interview that Vine Deloria, Jr. did with The Sun a while back, and was reminded how useful and meaningful his words have been to me in the last decade.

I thought I'd share the section of the interview that affected me the most:

Q: How does being in one place for a long time teach you who you are?
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5 Business Values I Learned Via Earlham College

Today I'm sitting on a panel at Earlham College where we'll talk some about the world of business and money-making in the context of an Earlham education.  As a part of preparing for it, I was thinking about how my time at Earlham, and my relationship with the College since, has informed my experience in the business world.

Here's a list of 5 business values that I think I learned via Earlham College:

  1. You can do good and still do well. While it hasn't been as black and white as Mark and I may have thought it would be when we started Summersault, we have found that it is generally possible to make ethical decisions and still make money.  When you do make ethical decisions and still make money as a result, it tends to feel better than other approaches.
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Another highway adventure

Trusty SteedToday I learned that the back seats of Ohio State Trooper cruisers are not at all designed for people like me with long legs.  In fact, to fit in it at all so that the officer could close the door to lock me in and take my statement, I had to sit nearly sideways!  You'd think that if someone is already being put in the back of a cop car, there's enough difficult stuff going on in their lives such that a little bit of leg room is in order.

About 45 minutes before I found myself in this situation, we were traveling down I-70 East in the heavily falling wet snow, gusting wind, and crowded highway lanes.  It was the kind of weather that should probably have kept us off the road, but if there's one thing that car culture teaches you, it's that nothing should stand in between you and your vehicle's destination, so there we were.

About six cars up, I saw headlights, and they were in my lane.  "Oh no," I thought, "not another one of these high speed car chases."  As I slowed us down, I watched the car spin out of control, cross over the median into the westbound lanes, cross back over the median and do two full spinning rotations, and then come to a stop.  We passed a split second later, and the driver appeared to be slumped over in her seat. Continue reading "Another highway adventure" →

Local food issues panel today

Later today I'll be sitting on a panel put together by the Wayne County Area Chamber of Commerce, and we'll be talking about issues related to local food.  Beyond some home gardening I'm not a food producer or any sort of expert, but between my work with the Clear Creek Food Coop, my interest in food / energy issues, and my efforts around making Richmond more self-reliant, I hope I'll have something useful to offer.

It's at 3:30 PM at Ivy Tech Community College, 3421 Johnson Hall - I hope you can join us.

In case you won't be able to attend, here's a list of 12 reasons that it's a good idea to support the production and consumption of locally grown food (adopted from a list produced by The Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association):

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