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Solarpunking Portland
Feb. 16th, 2021 05:14 pmSo the interwebs are telling me I haven't said anything here since August. My apologies, and I'll try to keep things to at least a weekly basis going forward.
It's been a busy half-year. I'd been in negotiations with housemate/landlord Jeph about buying the place from him when he got diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He promptly signed his affairs over to his ex and started preparing to die, which is not unreasonable. His ex, however, was, and evidently decided that the house was her ticket to Shangri-La, threw out the deal we'd been working on, and demanded about twice as much. So I hunted for a new place, found one, and moved. And aggrivated a long-known-but-untreated hernia in the process, got surgery for it, and discovered that the promised three-or-four-day recovery was more like a month or three.
While this has been going on I've been working on my Solarpunk Portland program. I've contacted 9 places for sponsorship, and have an appointment with one that has been postponed 3x now, and with another that has expressed a desire for one but not been able to get their act together enough to make one. And I've got seven callbacks to make along the lines of "I haven't heard from you. What's up?"
The basis of the program is fairly simple. I've written up a vision of what a Solarpunk Portland would be like, broken it down into about two dozen projects, and I want to run a seminar aimed at high school and college students in which they either pick one of my projects or propose their own, and develop a formal project proposal and project plan for it. I act as their Program Management office, helping them with their plans and proposals, finding or developing the necessary skill sets to carry them out, and learning how to not merely carry out a project, but how to do so as part of a coordinated program.
I'm nervous about my planning for the seminar, because as I perceive it it's going to be almost entirely improv. Going in, I don't know who my students are or what their skills, desires, and needs are, or what projects they might be interested in or abilities they have with which to pursue them. Mostly, I want to build excitement and enthusiasm, guide them in accepting ownership of their own projects, and then play support crew while they take their idea and run with it. Sounds a lot like parenting, now that I think about it.
More mundanely, we've just had our snow for the winter and have started in on the rain that's going to melt it all. We've just had our first actual consequence of the weather; the apartment complex laundromat runs off a cellphon app, and so do the registers of the market across the street -- so we can't do laundry using our cellphones and we can't get quarters to do it the old-fashioned way. So, no laundry 'til they get this straightened out. I'm still planning on staying in my room for another couple of days, because I don't like wading through slush. And how's *your* end of the world running?
It's been a busy half-year. I'd been in negotiations with housemate/landlord Jeph about buying the place from him when he got diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He promptly signed his affairs over to his ex and started preparing to die, which is not unreasonable. His ex, however, was, and evidently decided that the house was her ticket to Shangri-La, threw out the deal we'd been working on, and demanded about twice as much. So I hunted for a new place, found one, and moved. And aggrivated a long-known-but-untreated hernia in the process, got surgery for it, and discovered that the promised three-or-four-day recovery was more like a month or three.
While this has been going on I've been working on my Solarpunk Portland program. I've contacted 9 places for sponsorship, and have an appointment with one that has been postponed 3x now, and with another that has expressed a desire for one but not been able to get their act together enough to make one. And I've got seven callbacks to make along the lines of "I haven't heard from you. What's up?"
The basis of the program is fairly simple. I've written up a vision of what a Solarpunk Portland would be like, broken it down into about two dozen projects, and I want to run a seminar aimed at high school and college students in which they either pick one of my projects or propose their own, and develop a formal project proposal and project plan for it. I act as their Program Management office, helping them with their plans and proposals, finding or developing the necessary skill sets to carry them out, and learning how to not merely carry out a project, but how to do so as part of a coordinated program.
I'm nervous about my planning for the seminar, because as I perceive it it's going to be almost entirely improv. Going in, I don't know who my students are or what their skills, desires, and needs are, or what projects they might be interested in or abilities they have with which to pursue them. Mostly, I want to build excitement and enthusiasm, guide them in accepting ownership of their own projects, and then play support crew while they take their idea and run with it. Sounds a lot like parenting, now that I think about it.
More mundanely, we've just had our snow for the winter and have started in on the rain that's going to melt it all. We've just had our first actual consequence of the weather; the apartment complex laundromat runs off a cellphon app, and so do the registers of the market across the street -- so we can't do laundry using our cellphones and we can't get quarters to do it the old-fashioned way. So, no laundry 'til they get this straightened out. I'm still planning on staying in my room for another couple of days, because I don't like wading through slush. And how's *your* end of the world running?
