Metropolitan Rural

Two weeks ago I was standing in a conference center in Scottsdale, AZ.  I was with a good friend and business partner trying to hock our new business service to potential clients.  Things went really well and we’ve had a lot of follow-up and planning going on since.  Between that and trying to catch up with the new class I’m teaching, these past 2 weeks have been extremely busy.   I finally feel like I’m caught up at this point and wanted to share a few thoughts that have gone on with me the last several days.

1. I was really impressed on Friday night when we stopped by our local PetSmart to pick up some bedding for our guinnea pig.  Parked right next to us was a shiny, black Ford Escape Hybrid.  This was a car my wife and I had considered last year when we bought our new one.  It gets an EPA estimated 34 MPG in the CITY!  That’s right, 34 MPG In the city for a small SUV, that’s very impressive.  Still, we don’t drive enough to really justify the 10 grand extra that would have cost us.  What impressed me most was the license plate.  It read, “City of St. Louis, Director of Public Safety.”  Yep, a city vehicle.  And for an office that’s undoubtedly putting a lot of city miles on it.  Very smart decision and good use of my tax dollars.
2. Over the weekend I heard that Metro had finally announced their rate increases for next year.  My monthly pass will be going from $60 to $68.   Still not bad I guess.  My only problem still is the possibility that my express route could get canceled come spring.  That would mean my 35 minute trip to and from work would now become nearly an hour (if everything is on time).  That extra 25 minutes each way everyday makes me not want to use Metro.  I mean, I live about 5 miles from work, it shouldn’t take me an hour to get there, I could nearly walk that far in that amount of time!  So, I’m still thinking of options for me and waiting for the official announcement, but look for an extra car on the road for morning commutes come spring.
3. On Saturday I read a note on Mayor Slay’s website (he calls it a blog, but it hardly is considering there are no comments allowed) encouraging Metro to work out a deal to allow their system to be integrated with Google Maps.  I too would agree this is a great thing.  With my business I’ve started, I’ve got a cell phone with a data plan and built in GPS.  Google Maps has been great to have on my cell phone to look up directions.  To have easy access through there to bus routes and times would be awesome.

So, things have been busy, the holidays are upon us, and the boy is at the airport now on his way to visit his father for 10 days over Thanksgiving.  I’ve got lots of cleaning and organizing to do around the house so we can set up a Christmas tree in a couple of weeks and so I can turn our front “junk” room into a home office over the holiday.

We just made our way back from our family vacation on Monday.  It was 10 days of mostly good family time.  We made a few stops along our way out to Black Mountain, NC for a 5 day family conference on Unschooling.  It was the 7th (and last) Annual Live & Learn Conference.  If you are not familiar with the term Unschooling, which I’m sure very few people are, there is an excellent write-up over at Wikipedia.  We are relatively new to the concept and had a wonderful time meeting and learning from others.  Add to that spending 5, beautiful days in the Smokies and it makes for an even better experience.

While vacation left me thoroughly energized and refreshed, the start-up business I’ve been working on is in the midst of taking off (our first customer is waiting in the wings for us now).  I’m really hoping to get back into writing as I always seem to feel better when I’m writing.  There’s so much to say, but I have to admit, I’ve been paying very little attention to politics and general goings on around St. Louis the past few months.  It’s been more of a vegetative state as I recovered from over working and over teaching earlier this year.

Don’t count me out just yet!

Evidently I decided to take a bit of a sabbatical from blogging during the month of June.  Things became very busy, very quickly early last month with work, teaching, softball, little league and taking over duties as the neighborhood association treasurer (more on that later).  Oh, and let’s not forget the whole leaky roof scene I faced this last month too, I’ll fill you in on that later as well.

It looks like the light has finally broke at the end of my tunnel, and much to my pleasure it’s NOT a train!  I’ve got a mental list of posts I wanted to talk about the last few weeks, so I’ll be putting some of those topics together today to start posting again tomorrow.  I hope you look forward to seeing me around more again.

I’ll be mostly gone for a few days while I complete my civic duty as a juror.  Will write more later this week.

Yesterday was such a nice day.  I got a chance to go swing the golf clubs a little and even grilled out some bratwursts for dinner last night.  Then I wake up this morning to the radio and hear the forecast of a “Winter Weather Advisory with a possibility of 4″-8″ of snow”.  Wonderful, don’t you just love that?

At least yesterday was worth it.  The warm weather inspired a couple of other local bloggers to get out and enjoy the city as well.

Doug Duckworth over at Random Talk on Urban Affairs has a great post on The Duality of St. Louis and how the beauty of the buildings can intermingle with the devastation of lives.

Chris over at St. Louis Patina said he has some New Material.  Inspired by the weather he got out and took a lot of new pictures, so look forward to some more interesting information over there as well.

Hope you got a chance to get out and enjoy the weather yourself.  I know I did.

This was a very long weekend for me. I had the braces adjusted Friday afternoon, so I was getting used to the wires. In addition, I was given some wonderfully fun headgear to wear at night to help move things along quicker. The problem is trying to learn to sleep with the thing on. Being a side sleeper, having something stick out of my mouth and up the side of my head makes thing difficult.

Needless to say, the sleep I did get this weekend wasn’t all that good. One side effect I guess is that I nearly have the new website up and going. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I expected. So, sometime later today I’ll switch the feed over to the new site. In the mean time, you can still go visit the new digs (I’ll post this one over there as well) and leave me some comments if you like.

It’ll be fun having some more control over the design and layout. Hope to see everyone over there.

Metropolitan Rural

Just as a heads up for my readers. I recently purchased a domain name and hosting services. So, sometime in the next month I’ll be migrating all of this over to the new site. If you view this in a reader, make sure you have your feed pointed to the Feedburner link that is on the top right. That will be redirected to the new site, so you shouldn’t miss out on any of the fun.

I’ll put another post on here when the time gets closer and we are about ready to do the move. Wish me luck!

A couple months ago I ran across the phrase Blog Carnival. Not knowing what it meant, I swung over to Wikipedia to check it out. The basic premise is that a bunch of bloggers write articles on a given subject and then compile them together with a host who posts the results and links back to the articles. This is often done on a rotating basis of varying authors. It’s a great way to get some traffic to your blog and become more a part of the blog community.

I decided that I wanted to see if there was something like that here around St. Louis. From a quick Google search I ran across Saint Louis Bloggers. They are a listing of over a thousand blogs in and around the St. Louis Metro area. They also have started hosting a monthly carnival. I participated this last month (you can see the carnival if you follow the link above). I was also selected to host the December carnival thanks to my brilliant idea for a topic.

While I’m still waiting to get my password reset before I post the details over there, I thought I would also throw this out on here as well if anyone is interested in joining. Here are the details of the upcoming carnival that I will post the first of January. I think you’ll find the topic fun and enjoyable.

The Carnival Rules:

Interested STL Bloggers should write a new post on the stated theme by the specified deadline. They should then email the host at the provided email address with the following information:

1) Name of Blogger
2) Permalink URL of blog post
3) Title of Blog Post
4) URL of Blog
5) Title of Blog
6) Would you be interested in volunteering to be the next host? Yes/No
6a) If Yes – what would your theme be?

The host will then take all the submissions that meet the simple requirements of addressing the specified theme, and having been posted between the announcement and the deadline – and link to them from one post, with some annotative comments for each. This post shall be posted at StlBloggers.com, and if the host wishes, at their own blog. Participants should expect a delay of a few days between the deadline and this post.

The host will also choose the next host from the volunteers in any fashion they desire.

STLBloggers Blog Carnival #6
Host: Metropolitan Rural
Contact: curtismill [at] gmail [dot] com
Deadline: December 31st @ midnight. Email should be dated in the month of December
Theme: Which part of St. Louis is best? The City, The County, or The Beyond?

There has been lots of activity recently in both my blog neighborhood and my living neighborhood.

First the Blog Neighborhood:

• Curious Feet: This is a new blog started by Claire who posted regularly on Eco Absence along with Michael Allen. She is undertaking the task of walking in every neighborhood of St. Louis. Drop on by and wish her luck.
• Random Talk on Urban Affairs: This blog is run by Doug Duckworth who seems to have been inspired back into more regular posts by Claire. Always some good posts to make you think or at least make you laugh.

From my other neighborhood. Our e-mail list serve has been awash of activity lately about a couple of burglaries. People are keeping a look out for suspicious persons and passing along information about the activity of a couple of suspect cars and even people bold enough to look through windows from a front porch while people were home on the holiday yesterday!

It’s good to see we are keeping an eye out for each other. There are members of our district police office on our list serve as they post there from time to time as well. Hopefully they will get the guys or they will see enough pressure to move on elsewhere.

Just a quick note, I decided to update the name of my other blog last week. If you are looking for it and lost, here it is:

Real World Finances