Sometimes You Just Want to Get Away From It All

The federal government's General Services Administration is selling Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse and I think it would be nice if someone bought it and let me stay there when I want to.

Sure, I could buy it for myself, but I have enough trouble with the upkeep on my land-based house.

Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse is in the Delaware Bay about three miles off Bowers Beach. Somewhere out here.

It was built in 1876 and lacks modern everything. But it is damn cute.

The current bid stands at $40,000. Bidding closes on August 17. C'mon people...

When I first saw this, I sent an e-mail (half-serious) to an old friend who works in State Parks suggesting that the State buy this as a part of our Parks system. I was not surprised to learn that the folks over there gave this property serious thought, but have decided to pass. That probably makes sense; the maintenance challenges and the difficulty of making it "visitable" outweigh the coolness factor.

Of course, if someone does make the opportunity available, I'd love to spend a day and a night out there.

Wouldn't that be neat?

Saturday Evening, Early August, Bethany Beach

Saturday evening, we walked out onto the beach north of Bethany, just at sunset. There was a large puddle forming.

The puddle was formed by waves breaking over a build-up of sand at the front of the beach and washing back down towards the dunes. The kids were charmed.

Here's Some Good Advice

The zenhabits blog has a post up this morning that includes some good, simple advice on staying happy. In Five Great Ways to Achieve Happiness Through Serving Others, guest blogger Stephen Smith of HD BizBlog 1.2 writes about lessons he learned working in the service industries. He writes that he found something truly rewarding in serving others:

I remember going home after many 12- to 16-hour days, having served hundreds of people their meals and watched them dance and celebrate a special day with family and friends. At these times I felt tired, of course, but also invigorated and gratified by the display of human connection.

From his experiences he offers five ideas to consider as a way to increase our level of service to others and thereby increase our own happiness:

1. Show respect and courtesy.
2. Listen more than you speak.
3. Give genuine praise.
4. Keep your promises.
5. Practice forgiveness.

These seem very simple, and they are, but they are often lost in the rush of our busy days. It might be worth taking a moment to consider trying each of these as we make our way to and from work, deal with issues at the office, and struggle with the challenges of being good spouses, partners and parents.

Why I Read Jasper Fforde

Here's how Jasper Fforde begins his latest Thursday Next novel, First Among Sequels:

The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.

I am not ashamed to declare that I like absurdity. And Mr. Fforde offers inspired silliness in all of his novels that I have read so far. I plan to read more.

Our Beaches Are Expanding?

Well. They are expanding at least in the sense that real estate agents are greatly expanding the area that they market as "at the beach." The News Journal has a story this morning on the growing tendency of the real estate industry to market western Sussex County as beach lands.

In Marketers offer beach living in Bridgeville, Rachael Jackson looks at Heritage Shores, the large 55-and-older subdivision that has been tacked-on to Bridgeville. She notes that, while the development is about 45 minutes drive from the beaches, it is marketed as a beach development. She notes that this is a growing trend, not only here but nationally.

"It's definitely something that we're seeing going around nationally," said David E. Johnson, chief executive of Strategic Vision LLC, an Atlanta-based public relations and marketing agency that works with developers. Johnson said that in Florida, it's not uncommon for "beach" developments to be as much as an hour away from the sea.

I've been thinking about this trend lately. I touched on it last fall in a post that started out as a look at trends in development-naming. I was annoyed then by a development named "...at Rehoboth" that is a good 10 mile drive west of Rehoboth Beach. This isn't a large urban area, where you can go 10 miles and still be in the same place. I counted at least five named places between Rehoboth Beach and "...at Rehoboth."

What's going on is fairly simple. The land that is actually at the beach is just about completely developed. There is still room of course, but as it becomes less and less, the value goes ever higher and the new places at the beach rise out of the price range of most of the market.

So we build farther away from the beach. But "The Beach" is the main marketing tool for this area. So we have to redefine what constitutes "The Beach."

Vicki York, Realtor at Millville-based At the Beach Realty, said that beach boundaries have been redefined. Today, with an office as far west as Dagsboro, she said only 25 percent of the properties she works with are east of the Assawoman Canal, the traditional marker for the beach property area.

"If you get five minutes away from the beach, some people are like, 'What's another 10 or 15 minutes?' " she said.

Well, I'd say that it's another 10 or 15 minutes in a car, burning fossil fuels, adding air pollution, and clogging roads that are not designed to handle the load.

Our Beaches Are Popular

We spent the middle of the day today at the beach at Cape Henlopen State Park. It was very crowded, as one might expect on the first week-end in August.

According to Park Rangers I know, there are week-ends during which the Cape ranks as one of the most populated places in Delaware. People come from all around the region to camp there or to spend the day on the beach.

There is a long stretch of traditional beach, where people spread towels or blankets, unfold beach chairs, plant umbrellas and erect pavilions. It can be a challenge to find a few square feet for your family.

Further up the beach is one of the several surf fishing areas that we have in Delaware. These are places where by tradition and state law those who have fishing gear out and available for use -- and who have purchased a surf-fishing tag for their vehicle -- can drive out on the beach and park along the high-tide line.

The water was very nice, with a few large waves but not too many. The girls amused themselves body-surfing. I joined in for a few rides and floated contentedly just off-shore from the breakers for much of the rest of the time.

There were also the usual parade of tankers, ferries and other craft in and out of the Delaware bay shipping channel. I added a few to my "Distant Ships" collection.

Stepping Back Into the Walkability Discussion

A post on mileage in my Prius earlier this year sparked a discussion about the relative walkability or non-walkability of our lives. I was just thinking about that when I wrote my latest mileage report a few days ago.

I had a sense of irony, therefore, when I saw a link this morning to a web site called Walk Score which asks "How walkable is your house?" The site uses Google maps and geospatial data on the locations of things you might need to get to to determine how close things like schools, grocery stores, restaurants and other destinations are to your house and to determine the extent to which you could get by without a car.

Not too surprisingly, even though I live within the City of Lewes, the score for my house is a lowly 34 out of 100. That's in what Walk Score calls the "Not Walkable" range; "Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must."

Downtown Lewes itself is a fairly walkable place, but we are on the outskirts. Of course, I do want to point out that there are schools, a grocery store, doctors, restaurants and the library all within half a mile of my home.

The site is pretty open about what its limitations are. It is not set up to include in its measurement my commute, which is longer than it should be. On the other hand, I do make my drive to and from Dover in a very clean car.

My work location is more walkable, scoring an 84 out of 100. I'm lucky enough to work in the historic center of Dover and can do almost all errands, once I'm there, on foot.

Today, for example, I held a walking meeting with a colleague, on our way to a downtown restaurant, then walked over to DNREC to confer with a few of the IT folks there before walking back to my office to end the meeting. Very pleasant.

So. How walkable are your life's locations?

I Was Getting Bored With My Layout

I thought it was a good time to change the look of this blog. I have been planning to add a new element and looking at my 3-column layout for a place to put it led me to the thought that my blog was too busy-looking.

So I have gone a bit more "simple" and I have cut away some things that weren't quite working. I have also changed the photo thumbnails from "latest" to "random" selections from my photo collection. I like to blog about my photographic habit and so it was sometimes the case that the thumbnails on the sidebar duplicated the photos in the blog posting.

The new thing, a bit down on the left, is a list of things I am thankful for. It's a feed from a mini-blog I've started called "Gratitudes." I've heard a few thinkers, religious and secular, say that a daily act of gratitude, a regular practice of thankfulness, is good for one.

So I thought I'd try it as a blogging exercise.

Could Crowdsourcing Work Here?

There's an interesting article up this morning on the Annenberg School for Communication's Online Journalism Review on the subject of "crowdsourcing."

In A journalist's guide to crowdsourcing, Robert Niles defines crowdsourcing as using the web to organize the public at large as another source of information for a news organisation.

Crowdsourcing, in journalism, is the use of a large group of readers to report a news story. It differs from traditional reporting in that the information collected is gathered not manually, by a reporter or team of reporters, but through some automated agent, such as a website.

Stripped to its core, though, it's still just another way of reporting, one that will stand along the traditional "big three" of interviews, observation and examining documents.

There are drawbacks, and cautions, and plenty of effort needed to make it work, but the idea is one that I think we've all been moving towards, if not particularly smoothly or directly, for some time.

This article helped me bring into focus thoughts I've been having lately about two related phenomenons in Delaware. One has been the growth of an increasingly self-aware Delaware Blogging Community. The other has been the News Journal's so far uneven Reader Comments system.

Both show the energy and interest that exists among Delawareans about the news and issues of the state. Both also, however, show the tendency of "regular folks" to give-in to their prejudices and preconceived ideas.

Obviously this is worse among an unfortunate minority of the commenting readers on the News Journal site, but Delaware's bloggers also can fall into bad habits and habitual rants. The bloggers tend to be a bit more disciplined in their writing and the community that has grown up among the regular bloggers has started to act as a form of editorial board. But we could do better.

A news organization's "crowdsourcing" could be another facet of the work that we've been doing. If properly designed, and maintained, and edited, it could add many more voices to the mix.

And that might be a very good thing.

Prius' Progress

I reached 80,000 miles on my 2005 Toyota Prius this evening. The blink-over conveniently came just as I was pulling up to the 5-Points traffic light to make the left from Route 1 to Savannah Road.

It's been 42 days since my last milestone report, on June 20, when I passed 77,777 miles. That blog post sparked a discussion of my commuting habits.

I calculated then that I had averaged nearly 87 miles per day in the Prius over the 4 months between 66,666 and 77,777. Today I calculate that I've averaged almost 53 miles each day since June 20. I should note, though, that for two full weeks, while we were up north, the Prius sat quietly in the garage.

By the way, I've taken enough of these odometer-graphs now to create a Prius' Progress flickr set. I'm so proud.