@lizzybeeapex.bsky.social
Grantwriter, volunteer, gardener, bus rider, pedestrian. Introvert, eccentric, insomniac, vegan, frugal, book reader. Retiring after long career with Habitat for Humanity. Lived in California, Massachusetts, Texas, North Carolina.
This sounds fabulous! Maybe a condensed fully-remote version could be offered for bus riders who advocate locally but are not affiliated with organizations or are retired. I am the only bus rider on my town's Multi-Modal Transportation Advisory Board. Eager to improve my skills.
I use the bus and a long walk to get to a laundromat. Lots of time and lots of quarters!
Insistence upon easy-boarding flat-entrance bus design. My town and the adjacent city currently use a Ford E-450/Arboc V8 Minibus with a steep boarding angle. Older riders, anyone with a walking cane, and passengers with minor physical disabilities are struggling.
The Clancy's brand of "Mexican Style Street Corn Chip Dippers" are really good. $1.99 at Aldi's. However, they are right at the border of being too salty. I love Fritos, but my budget has me switching to generic everything!
www.aldi.us/product/clan...
Reading the book now! Lovely vision: "Looking beyond the basic fairness of multimodal accessibility, cities increasingly prioritize slow access over speedy mobility, neighborhood livability over traffic throughput, and even café tables over traveling or parking."
I am blitz-reading everything ever written by Val McDermid at the moment. Focused on the crime novel series first, but the nonfiction is on my list as well.
Voted for you yesterday!
Hello from a bus rider in booming Apex, North Carolina. Happy to discover your videos via this Durham tour. Thanks for liking our airport transportation, which deserves more appreciation.
Powerful! "Regular people, decent people, faced with intolerable things. That’s who all of the people that you see on the breathless cable news coverage of these protests are."
The cute little dachshund in my house is an unrepentant sock thief. These dogs should team up!
Infuriating! "The U.S. currently spends four times more on housing benefits for the wealthy than the poor; the home mortgage interest deduction is a larger program than Housing Choice Vouchers, and its benefits accrue almost entirely to the richest fifth of Americans."
I am sorry, especially since you are an advocate for affordability in the housing realm. My monthly premium is now 20% of my modest income, without any of my current doctors or the main local hospital system in-network.
I like this quote as well: "Good community, when it works, is actually a form of radical convenience. It means borrowed tools instead of purchases, familiar faces instead of customer service lines, help that shows up before you know how to ask for it." - Jon Jon Wesolowski
Helpful! I live in Apex, North Carolina -- a small town outside of Raleigh that has turned into a wealthy suburb with explosive growth over the past fifteen years. We now have a single hourly bus loop. Some stops will be eliminated and theoretically a new route will be added. A survey would be good.
In the various transit systems in the greater Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, we have many options to get reasonably close to a Walmart. But a bus to the library? Not yet in my town of Apex, North Carolina (maybe in 2028-2029). So I need convoluted bus trips to cities to check out books.
Brilliant, broad scope, practical fiction about how climate change can begin to be mediated despite growing environmental damage. Told in multiple global voices, with particular focus on the multinational government agency charged with coordinating a response to protect future generations.
Publishers Weekly wrote: “A sweeping, optimistic portrait in the face of disaster. This heartfelt work of hard science fiction is a must-read for anyone worried about the future of the plant.” Loved the concept of returning half the earth to wildlife Habitat. The author is a genius.
Personal story: Extremely nervous! Only learned how to drive at age 40 when I ended up in small town outside of Raleigh due to job transfer. Drove five minutes to office, but never on highways and rarely outside town limits. 23 later: explosive growth brought an hourly bus and I gave up that car.
I am in Apex, North Carolina, where there have not been local ICE threats "yet." I serve on the town Transportation Advisory Board. Our hourly bus would be the obvious target here for attacking immigrants and people of color. I will insist on a town plan for protecting residents who ride the bus.
Encouraging and admirable. This reference gives me hope for the country: "regular people who finally reached a point where doing nothing felt worse than the risks of doing something." Thank you for your educational posts.
Cool! My town of Apex, North Carolina, has a Rainbow Bridge as a memorial for beloved pets along a greenway that connects to a prominent shopping area.
This is a Trump horror story, of course. But your flair with language included a reference that made me laugh: "so far Trump’s plans for improving the battle readiness of the American military are mostly limited to pictures of make-believe battleships that will never be built."
Carol O'Connell: Shell Game. Donna Tartt: The Secret History. Denise Mina (Scottish crime novels). Anna Quindlen: Every Last One. Peter Zheutlin: Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs, and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway. Marcus Zusak: The Book Thief (sobbing, sobbing.)
Maeve Binchy: Minding Frankie (kindness and redemption at the end). Alan Bradley: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (eccentric). Andre Dubus III: House of Sand and Fog. Franklin Allen Leib: The House of Pain (post-traumatic stress). Robert Wilson: A Small Death in Lisbon.
Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance (the author's immense talent has been compared to Dickens and Tolstoy). "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout. Corban Addison: A Walk Across the Sun. Sarah Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither (warning: often very dark). A.S. Byatt: Possession.
Love this exchange of favorite books! Ann Patchett: Bel Canto. Abraham Verghese: Cutting for Stone. Yanagihara, Hanya: A Little Life (this will break your heart; look at a review or summary first to make sure the intense subject matter will be suitable for your tastes).
Wonderful perspective. I live in Apex, North Carolina -- a rural small town 25 years ago and now an affluent suburb with explosive growth. The few remaining older strip malls with thrift stores, small churches, immigrant-owned businesses, and food trucks are the lively interesting corners.
Thank you for educating me about the term "beg button." I've had that frustration at cross walks in my North Carolina town but did not know the term. Helpful for advocacy here!
My local laundromat is operated by an adjacent church and has lots of amenities. Comfortable chairs, secondhand books, and a magazine collection. I used to bring my own library book to fill the time, but fun to find something random in the freebie pile. Also nonperishable free food available.
I am shifting into early retirement. As a lifelong bookworm, I am so happy to have uninterrupted time to just read, read, read. I am blitz reading through everything written by favorite authors and re-reading favorites. Fortunately, I have dogs demanding walks, so frequent outside time as well.