Another member connecting with her neighbors through Front Porch Forum (this one from the Malletts Bay Neighborhood Forum in Colchester, VT)…
I’ve made a habit of sending a “welcome to the front porch” email to people when they join my neighborhood forum. Most recently, I had a pleasant response and the two of us began emailing back and forth, she is looking for a kitten or cat for a pet, I let her know about a friend who has new kittens she is trying to find homes for. As we exchanged emails I shared about a hike sponsored by a local church and wanted to clarify that I attend a different congregation. Anyway, she emailed back that she is the same denomination and not yet hooked up with a congregation!
So, I’ve invited her and her daughter to join us for all or part of the weekend at our Lake Elmore retreat and we are getting together at a local playground to meet each other in person later this week.
Fun way to make a connection that likely might have never been made! Thank you.
Burlington Ward 5 City Councilor Bill Keogh is using Front Porch Forum to organize an initiative he calls Walk with Me…
Want to reduce your health care costs? Start at home by (and you’ve heard this before): not smoking, watch how often you eat and how much you eat, and exercise. Exercise is not a sophisticated endeavor. It means you get out and walk. Walk up and down the street, around your block. Just walk.
With that in mind, I am looking for volunteer WWM’s! Those are Walk With Me leaders. You would be the person in your neighborhood who would be a leader in a neighborhood walk of, maybe 15 mins a day, twice a week. This proposal is to get folks in the neighborhood together, to take a short evening stroll. Aha! Exercise and sociability.
By neighborhood, I’m talking about focusing around the area covered by your electronic Front Porch Forum. The walks could be at 7 p.m. on a weekday and one day of the weekend. If you are interested, contact me at bkeoghsr@yahoo.com for more details and support.
Good for Bill! I know a former councilor who has done the same thing in her own New North End neighborhood through Front Porch Forum. Another great use of this service.
Steve Urquhart, a Utah state rep. who I met at the PDF conference had these wonderful things to say on his blog…
One of the most interesting projects I saw at PDF was FrontPorchForum (FPF). FPF is using online community to build real community. According to FPF co-founder Michael Wood-Lewis, about 20% of the people in Burlington, Vermont, are FPF members. Membership groups are limited to neighborhoods and sign-in is by real name. By using the forum to help match needs with resources for things like shoveling snow, moving furniture, obtaining emergency firewood when a furnace failed, selling old cars, staffing neighborhood watch programs, etc., FPF is using the Internet to help build better neighborhoods in Burlington. Way to go, Michael!
UPDATE (Later): My friend Arjun Singh, the bloggingist city council member in all of Kamloops, British Columbia, paid me a visit in the comments. It’s really funny how people see the world. As far as I know, Arjun and I were the only two elected officials at PDF (at least he’s the only one that I met, I should say). And we both work on the local level (though city and county council types might challenge me on that assertion). While there were lots of famous and important people there and lots of cool things to catch someone’s attention (I’ll blog about some in the coming days), if you look at his blog, you’ll see that Arjun and I both lasered in on a not-so-flashy site doing worthwhile things at the local level.
I had trouble imaging a happy ending when the following message came across the Huntington Neighborhood Forum from a local blacksmith yesterday…
I left my MacBook Pro (17″ screen) on top of my truck and took off down the road. Long story short it fell off between Huntington and Montpelier. At some point I herd a clunk, looked over and passed it off as the passenger seat-belt rattling in the wind. I’m sure that was the the computer. In retrospect I’m thinking this would have happened on the road to Richmond OR getting on the I 89 going south in Richmond . I remember saying to myself I’m not stopping now to fix the seat belt.
Anyway PLEASE keep an eye out for a silver case on the side of the road while biking, walking, or driving. More then likely its in pieces but it has all my business data and such on it….. An obvious lesson for all can be learned from this $2800.00 ++ mistake. I’ll let you all figure it out as it’s way to painful for me to relay.
Today some other Front Porch Forum members weighed in with similar thoughts as mine…
All I can say is “ooouuuuch!” As a dedicated Mac user, I know your pain must be great… I hope some Samaritan found it and will return it to you! If so, you should be able to recover the drive…
So imagine my surprise when the following note just arrived!
I received a call from Small Dog Electronics in Burlington. Some one picked up my lap top off the hi way and delivered it to them!! It was run over a few times BUT the hard drive still works! So all my info was not lost and all will be recovered. HOW ABOUT THAT! Small Dog actually said it could be repaired! Thanks to all that looked for me.
Gotta love the happy ending.
Just chatting with a Front Porch Forum subscriber this evening… ran into her on Church Street during Jazz Fest. Last we spoke, she was in tears because her car had been vandalized and broken into in her Old North End/Hill neighborhood.
Today it was all smiles. She posted a note about her experience on her neighborhood forum and – viola! – she got two responses… one from a neighbor who’s nearby car was side-swiped about the same time, and another from a neighbor who put her in touch with a city program to help victims of such crimes.
So she got to commiserate with someone, find some redress for her problem, and then she passed along the victim-program info to the other person whose car was damaged… and felt good about lending a helping hand too!
Oh… and she found a squash partner (that’s with racquets on a court!) through her neighborhood forum. A happy subscriber indeed!
A near-tragic tale played out on the other side of the window just beyond the monitor that hogs so much of my attention every day. As reported on the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum…
One of the movers unloading the North American truck next door apparently was bit in the neck by a spider yesterday evening (5/30/07). He had a terrible reaction and ended up in the emergency room and in the hospital overnight. His wife came and drove him home to Rhodes Island this morning. It reportedly was not an allergic reaction. The mover is a big, young, otherwise healthy guy.
The spider seemed to be hanging out in a stack of moving pads, so no telling where s/he came from…
I sincerely hope the mover makes a full recovery. I’m also concerned that the spider might have survived the encounter and is hanging around the Five Sisters. If anyone has any more or better information or insights, I’d love to hear them. -Michael
P.S. The moving truck’s battery now is dead (a light was left on in the confusion), the healthy mover gone back to Rhodes Island (he wasn’t qualified to drive) and I’m not sure how or when the truck will depart. Alas. One little spider wields some power in this world evidently.
Posted mid-day, this stirred up a lot of our neighbors… almost all of them it felt like as I heard it all from passersby as I sat on the front steps watching our tots. Here’s the follow-up…
Lori Myers, private detective, called the moving company in Rhodes Island and was told that the mover that was bitten smooshed the spider. Also, the company said that the spider was definitely poisonous… the mover’s heart stopped. They believe that he will be fine, but obviously he’s been through a terrible time. As far as the spider’s origins, no one knows. Escaped pet? The truck hasn’t left New England. But who knows about recent cargo, moving pads, etc. Lori wondered about eggs and suggested spraying the van to the moving company.
The truck remains planted outside our front door. The company plans to have it towed this afternoon. I feel a little like Jim reporting from the front lines on Wild Kingdom.
Good news… the truck was finally towed away. The tow-truck guy looked a bit pale when told the story… but he provided a great “big trucks!” show for the little ones. Finally, neighbor, school commissioner, author, and Daily Show guest, Fred Lane shared a post script…
Hi neighbors — Michael’s posting on the power of spiders reminded me of the story of the Scottish King Robert the Bruce, who according to legend was hiding in a cave following a particularly nasty defeat by the British in the winter of 1305-06. While there, he saw a spider trying unsuccessfully to spin a web. But after each failure, the undaunted spider would try again. Bruce was inspired by the spider’s perseverance and eventually secured Scotland’s independence eight years later.
The story is almost certainly apocryphal (Bruce’s cave has as many claimant’s as Washington’s bed), but it still has a hold in Scotland. In Dunfermline Abbey, where his body is buried, there is a stained glass window of King Robert the Bruce, and in the lower corner is depicted a tiny spider. And according to one children’s book, there are still many people in Scotland (especially those named Bruce) who will not kill a spider out of deference to the old story.
Ahh… for the simple pleasures of childhood. When I was a boy – before PCs, before DVDs, before VCRs, before even cable – our seven-member family used to gather on occasion in the living room to watch home movies from the old clickety clack 8mm projector. My dad had a few reels of ancient cartoons (think Steam Boat Willie… silent, of course).
After every can of film had been turned inside out, invariably, one of us would shout out… “let’s see ’em backwards!” And Dad would oblige, sending every kid in the house to the worn green carpet, rolling in laughter as Uncle George walked backwards up the hill, and brother Jim un-wiped out on Cypress Garden water skis.
So nostalgia got the better of me today when I saw twin postings by the Hungry Vermont guys, Michael J. Nedell and Steve McIntyre, each in their own neighborhoods on Front Porch Forum…
Hi folks. I shot the beginning of the marathon from Pearl Street as the runners made the first quick turn. A solid stream of them, which you can see by Clicking Here . I also ran it backwards because – I don’t know where this started – but I have an affinity for shooting videos that I feel will look interesting backwards, and Clicking Here will take you there.
My question… are there any 8-year-olds doubled over laughing at this kind of thing anymore? There must be some pithy youTube insight here, but I’ll leave that to the faithful reader.
Always interesting at Front Porch Forum world headquarters. Here are a few member headlines from today…
1. Stuffed dog-model wanted (cat and toddler too) – from The Addition Neighborhood Forum. The local Humane Society want lifelike stuff creatures to use in evaluating and training their animals and new pet-owners.
2. Free bags of dog fur – from the Centennial Neighborhood Forum. Tempting, I know. The person posting thought some gardeners might find it helpful in warding off pests. It would keep me away. 😉
3. Metal detector needed! – from the Crescent Woods Neighborhood Forum. Only the title came through, followed eight minutes later by a retraction. Metal detected? Emergency passed? Now I’m curious!
Here’s a beautiful story that just came across the Airport Drive Neighborhood Forum…
Hi Everyone – This weekend (Sat & Sun, 9am-3pm) I will be holding a yard sale at 33 Forest Street [South Burlington]. The proceeds from this sale will go to send my parents on a much-deserved, very belated honeymoon. This June marks their 30th anniversary. They have never had the money or time to take a honeymoon, or even a vacation together, though they did find the money to provide me with a beautiful wedding last year. To thank them for that, my husband and I are putting on this yard sale to raise the money to send them off on a little honeymoon. How much we raise determines how far we can send them. Ideally, I would like to be able to send them to Maine or the Cape because my mom has never seen the ocean, but has always wanted to.
The yard sale is being held at my parents’ house. They are completely unaware that this is to benefit them. They think I am holding it to raise money for my grad. tuition. So if you can stop by to support this, keep the real purpose of it a secret!
There are ceramics you can paint yourself, yarn, crafty whatnots, books, clothes, dishes, kitchen things, games, toys, etc. Thanks for your support! -Rebekah
If you’re local… stop by a spend a couple bucks. If you’re a Front Porch Forum subscriber, post this message on your own neighborhood forum to help spread the word!
Here’s a wonderful Front Porch Forum posting from a senior citizen on the ONE East Neighborhood Forum. She was stunned by the quickness and number of responses to her call for lawn help. She’s full of gratitude for those around her who beautify the neighborhood. She issues a safety reminder. And, she offers a $100 reward for return of her lost hearing aids! Read on to see what she was doing when she lost them! -Michael
Wow. What a response to my mowing plea. The 1st one came in at about 1 AM. I am not a regular computer person yet so didn’t check my email until late in the day by which time someone had called me on the phone and then actually mowed my lawn. Thank you so much to the other 5 or 6 people who offered.
Thanks also to the people who plant flowers in the greenbelt and the ones who pick up trash, which I hope someday will be all of us all the time. My grandmother used to stoop over and pick up trash when I was a child and I would be mortified. Now I do it too.
I’m also grateful to the bikers who ride responsibly who mostly seem to be children. It must be hard to remember how quickly a bike can appear out of nowhere and how relatively slowly a car can respond.
I have another topic. Last night I lost one of my hearing aids. I was getting a ride home up North St.on the back of a motorcycle and it was in my left hand pocket. We rode from parking space in front of the brick houses on Elm St. on UU Church property to North St. and then up North St. to 447. There is a $100 reward. Thanks.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more