Trailer Park Girl

In the sustainability sphere, I recommend two free, public events coming up this week:

1) Austin Permaculture Guild’s talk/presentation on intentional community, co-housing, eco-villages. Slides, video, discussion.
Date/time: Wednesday March 12, 7pm
Place: Habitat Suites Hotel, 500 E. Highland Mall Dr.
More info: 512-619-5363 / www.permie.us

2) Reception to kick off Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5, a project by artist/activist Fritz Haeg. (From a press release about Edible Estates: “The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape. This project was launched by architect and artist Fritz Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in the geographic center of the United States, Salina, Kansas.”)
Date/time: Thursday March 13, 6-9pm
Place: ArtHouse at the Jones Center, 700 Congress Ave.
More info here.

The Austin Permaculture Guild is having its next Permaculture Basics Weekend this spring, May 17-18. Class is all day both days, and will include lecture, discussion, and group exercises. For more information, check out www.permie.us

Hope you’ll join us! It’ll be fun! Oh, I should mention, I’m going to be one of the teachers!

So here I am in the downtown library, not my neighborhood SoCo branch. Downtown library is nice, big, clean, well-stocked (full of language tapes among other things!), but NOISY. First there’s some French woman on a cellphone, recounting her woes at length in detail to the customer-service flunky of some vacuum-cleaner-bag company; then the security guard(!) posted at a desk near the entrance is jabbering on the phone with a co-worker; now some dude is blasting AC/DC at all of us through the earphones of his walkman. The striking thing was that in all of these cases, it took me at least a couple of minutes to notice: “Hey, that’s not the normal noises in here!” I guess that I too have become (to some extent) inured to the default din of the modern world.

And don’t even get me STARTED on the subject of public libraries needing to have security guards …