Kristin Janz

Um.  Can you guys try not to put the corn on the cob on top of the baby spinach next time?  I swear, Wilson Farm has the worst grocery baggers on the planet (I’ve lost track of how many peaches, plums and nectarines they’ve ruined), and apparently the same people are putting the CSA shares into the baskets.

We finally got a decent amount of tomatoes.  For a few weeks, we’d been getting 2 a week.  This week we got 16.  Donald is a little disappointed that we still got the same massive amount of zucchini and summer squash, though.  And lettuce is back, after a lovely 2-week lettuce hiatus.  I’m sort of disappointed that heirloom tomatoes are in full swing, and we only got the most basic, boring tomatoes they grow at Wilson Farm.  But I can sort of understand.  The heirloom ones tend to be more susceptible to splitting and cracking, especially around the stem, and once that happens they go bad pretty quickly.  If we got 16 large heirloom tomatoes, we’d have to eat nothing but for a couple of days so that they didn’t rot before we got to them.  And then we’d have no tomatoes left for the rest of the week.  Also, even basic, boring tomatoes are pretty tasty in August, when they’re locally grown (not the tasteless ones that they pick green in California and blow ethylene gas over to sort of ripen them before they put them out on the shelf in your Massachusetts grocery store).

For dinner tonight, I made Mediterranean couscous salad (with tomatoes and zucchini, as well as other vegetables), tomato and mozzarella salad with basil, and boiled corn on the cob (with lime-cilantro butter).  Fresh local raspberries from our CSA share for dessert (even though Donald was eyeing the new cherries I’d bought; I told him we had to eat the raspberries first, though, because they’re more perishable).  Everything was yummy, though Donald opted out of the couscous salad because of the measly 1 cup of diced zucchini I’d added, and had leftover pork tenderloin with figs from last night instead.

Here’s the text of an email I sent to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s customer service division on Friday.  (Some information has been redacted, because I’m not that obnoxious.  Yet.)

 

Although I was not on the bus when this incident occurred, I am a regular MBTA customer.  I was riding my bike along Mass Ave, westbound, and was passed unsafely by the XX bus (vehicle number XXXX).  This occurred between 2:05 and 2:10 pm today (July 22), just past the intersection with Pleasant St.  The bus passed too close to me, with inches to spare, and it might have hit me, potentially causing serious injury, if I had not moved farther to the right.  This occurred just after the light changed to green.  The irony is that if I had broken the law and ridden through the red light, I could have avoided this unsafe situation, and not been in the bus driver’s way.  This is, in fact, why many cyclists do not stop at red lights, because we feel that our safety will be threatened if we do by the impatient motorists and bus drivers behind us.  I still choose to obey the law, and I would prefer to not be endangered by reckless MBTA bus drivers as a result.

I don’t want the bus driver to get in trouble, because I know that we all make mistakes on the road, and he or she may have genuinely miscalculated and not intended to pass so closely.  However, I would hope that someone would speak to the driver about this incident, reminding them that cyclists are entitled to use the roads in Massachusetts, and that if there isn’t room to pass a cyclist safely while staying in the same lane, and the lane to the left is occupied by cars, they need to wait until either the lane on the left is open, or the cyclist has turned off the road onto another street.  In this particular case, bus drivers should be aware that many cyclists who go through the intersection between Mass Ave and Pleasant St at Arlington Center are planning to take a right turn 2 blocks later onto Water St to access the bike path.  Because of the Arlington town bylaw banning the riding of bikes on sidewalks, this is the only legal way to use the bike path to get through Arlington Center without dismounting and walking.  If the XX bus driver behind me had been patient enough, they would have had the lane all to themself after I turned onto Water St.

Thank you for your time, and I trust that this matter will be addressed.  I will be posting this letter to my personal website and blog, along with any response I should receive from the MBTA regarding this issue.

So far, I have received the following, apparently an automated email response:

 

Hello,

We appreciate your business and value your feedback.  A customer service issue was logged on 07/22/2011 at 15:27:59.  A tracking number of XXXXXXXX has been assigned to this call.  Please reference this number on any additional communications you may have regarding this issue.

Type of Feedback: Complaint

Topic :                          Other

The information you provided has been forwarded to the appropriate department to be addressed.  If additional actions are required, a member from that department will follow up on your issue.

We’ll see if I ever hear anything else from them.  Like I said, I don’t want anyone to get in trouble.  Everyone makes the occasional mistake while driving, and usually nothing too terrible comes of it, and we all try to do better next time.  On the other hand, if anyone should be expected to drive safely and follow the rules of the road (including not passing other vehicles–including bicycles–unless it’s safe to do so), it’s city bus drivers.  This isn’t the first time I’ve been put in an unsafe situation while biking because of a reckless bus driver.  And I’m sick of hearing about how cyclists never stop at red lights, every time some cyclist complains about being threatened by a motorist.  I always stop at red lights.  I didn’t used to, but I do now.  The only time I ran a red light in the past year was when a motorist behind me was yelling and honking because I was moving too slowly and he couldn’t pass because of all the snow piled up on the edges of the road, and I ran the red light because I was turning onto the bike path half a block later and I was genuinely afraid that if I didn’t, the motorist was going to pull some dangerous stunt to try to teach me a lesson, or pass me when there wasn’t room to do so safely.  (Even though I was doing nothing more illicit than riding my bike on the street, which I have every legal right to do.)  Like the bus driver did on Friday.

For a moment, I was afraid that those responsible for the latest version of WordPress didn’t want those of us who aren’t so good with computers to be able to insert links into our posts.  I tried doing the usual thing where you highlight the bit of text that you’d like the reader to be able to click on, to go to the link, and then clicking on the “link” link.  That used to give you a window where you could paste in the link that you wanted to insert.  However, the first time I tried it in the new WordPress, it gave me a DIFFERENT-looking pop-up window!  (Those of us where aren’t good with computers would prefer that all the programs we use maintain exactly the same appearance for their entire lifetime, or we get really confused.)  Worse, when I pasted in the link I wanted, it put the path to the link right at the beginning of my post, not over the portion of text I’d selected.

Fortunately, before I had to start calling out “Donald!  Donald!” in increasingly desperate tones, I noticed that I now had a choice of “Visual” and “HTML” editor for creating a post, and that the default was set on “HTML”.  Hmm, I thought, maybe “Visual” is what I want here.

So I clicked on the “Visual” tab.  I got the same new-looking window pop-up when I clicked on the Link icon (they replaced the word “link” with a little picture of some links of chain, which would have confused me except that the administrator of another website had already explained to me what that icon meant).  That made me a little nervous, but fortunately, this time it put the link over the selected text (right where I wanted it), not at the beginning of my post.

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about free software.  Fortunately, my husband Donald knows a lot more about computers and programming than I do.  Otherwise this blog would be a lot more work for me.

I post all this just in case anyone who reads my blog is even more computer-inept than I am (this is unlikely, but you never know).

An open letter to the nice gentlemen who hollered at me to “Stay on the f**cking sidewalk!” as I was bicycling down Cambridge St towards the Longfellow Bridge this afternoon:

1. Bicyclists do not have to ride on the sidewalks in Massachusetts. In fact, they aren’t supposed to. In some towns (such as Arlington, where I live), it’s against the law and subject to a fine.

2. Bicyclists riding in the right-hand lane do not have to pull over even farther to the right and let you pass whenever the left-hand lane is full of other cars. Particularly when there’s a line of parked cars along the edge, and the cyclist would either have to come to a complete stop, or ride close enough to the parked cars to risk getting “doored”.

3. In fact, bicyclists don’t have to pull over and let you pass even when there’s only one lane of traffic in either direction. We’re allowed to sit right in the middle of the lane. Just like a car. You can either wait until it’s safe and legal for you to pull out into the oncoming traffic lane and pass, or drive at the same pace we’re driving, or find an alternate route. (I don’t usually take advantage of this right, because I’m a nice person. I do sometimes use the middle of the lane when there’s a perfectly good left lane for motorists to use when they’d like to pass.)

All this also applies to the SUV driver who tailgated me, honking, and then passed dangerously close, so that I had to move over closer than I liked to the row of parked cars (I’m willing to give him or her–but let’s be honest, it’s usually a him–the benefit of the doubt, in that he may not have realized he was passing me unsafely. Sometimes I think they do it out of spite, though.). Apparently you don’t think you’re paying enough for car insurance!

Sometimes I’m tempted to take down license plate numbers of cars whose drivers harass me and post them on a special “Wall of Shame” page on my blog. Don’t get me started on the ones who think I’m not allowed to make a left turn from Mass Ave onto Somerville Ave from the center eastbound lane, or don’t realize that even if I were driving a car instead of a bike, I’d have to wait for the green arrow, and they’d still be stuck behind me.

Cyclists can be obnoxious too, though. Too many cyclists in Massachusetts think we aren’t required to stop at red lights (bicyclists on the road have to obey all the same laws as motorists, except that we are permitted to pass other vehicles on the right). Just today, I saw a woman biking along, weaving slightly, and when I passed her I saw that she was holding her iPod in one hand.

The problem is that, in Massachusetts, the motorists, cyclists and pedestrians all show blatant disgregard for whatever traffic laws might inconvenience them. Part of it is that the roads are set up so poorly, with inadequate signage and ridiculously long wait times at pedestrian-controlled intersections. I’m no exception, sadly. I don’t have the patience to wait through 1 1/2 entire light cycles when I want to cross the street. And the other weekend, I irritated Donald to no end by refusing to make a right turn when I found out with twenty feet to spare that I was in a right-turn only lane (I just angled the car so I was blocking both lanes of traffic if the other lane wouldn’t let me in). Or was it that I made a left turn from the right-hand lane, because I realized at the last minute that my turn had come up, and I hadn’t seen the street sign early enough to move over to the left? Ha! I’ve done both, I can’t remember which it was this time. (I hope it wasn’t both at the same time.)

At least I don’t holler obscenities at poor, defenseless cyclists.

I just received a fundraising letter that contained this line: “If you love children–as I know you do–please give now.”

Okay, I still have to write about my visit to the Tabasco sauce factory, but it’s really late and I’m too tired for a long post with pictures.

I just got a letter from WBUR (Boston’s NPR news station) asking for money. Don’t get me wrong, I like NPR, and listen to it almost every day. I’ve even given them money in the past. I wouldn’t claim they’re an unbiased news source, but I don’t think any news source is, and for the most part I find myself in agreement with their politics (otherwise I probably wouldn’t enjoy listening to them so much).

There’s one line in the letter though, that just encapsulates what most irritates me about them. They’re trying to point out how the reader of the fundraising letter relies on NPR (and hence should give them more money), and they ask:

“Have you ever held court at a party because you could talk with confidence about the complexities of the recession, not just in the U.S., but also in Spain, Germany and Greece?”

For one thing, the only parties I go to where people would be impressed by my ability to parrot back whatever I heard on NPR last week tend to be attended by other people who also listen religiously to NPR, and probably also heard that same news segment.

For another … “hold court”? Maybe there’s a target audience for this letter that does see themselves holding court, entrancing all the other cocktail party attendees with their knowledge and insight. Not that I never try, but I usually look back afterwards and think, “You know, I sounded kind of full of myself.”

This was the letter from WBUR in Boston, so maybe the NPR fundraising letter in other regions of the country sounds a little less pretentious.

As one of my roommates pointed out, lines like that are why many people who don’t listen to NPR think those of us who do are a bunch of smug assholes.

Okay, I guess I unfairly accused the old lady down the street from my boyfriend of stealing his cookies. The postal service returned them to me as undeliverable.

I do have an unfortunate habit of jumping to the conclusion that people have stolen stuff of mine (or borrowed it without asking), and then finding out in an hour or so that the item in question is actually right where I last left it, maybe hidden by a stray paper or two.

Can I complain about the US Postal Service, though? I’ve lost track of the amount of mail that’s been delivered to my address, but is addressed to people who haven’t lived here in at least 10 years. Or that isn’t supposed to come to this street address at all (it’s supposed to go to another house on our street, or even another house 1 or 2 streets over). Not to mention all the times they’ve lost letters, magazines, credit card statements and Amazon packages addressed correctly to me and my roommates.

The one time I wish they would just drop off the package at the address written on the box, they have to suddenly start following protocol and making sure the person whose name is on the box actually lives there. Though clearly, they’re not on the ball enough to think to themselves, “Hmm, there’s a Donald Crankshaw who lives on this street, just a few houses down … maybe this package is really for him.”

Grrr!

This story requires some background information. For Christmas this past year, one of the presents I gave my boyfriend Donald was a 6-month membership in the Cookie-of-the-Month club. This entailed me baking cookies once a month, and then either giving them to him or mailing them if I wasn’t going to see him soon enough (cause who wants stale cookies?).

This was not my idea. I stole it from my roommate’s sister. I’m not sure I’d do it again, especially since I also gave this gift to my brother-in-law on the west coast (assuming that neither Donald nor my brother-in-law would want to eat an entire batch of cookies on their own). Postage is more than you’d think, especially to the west coast.

In any case, I just baked the last batch of cookies (chocolate chip) last weekend, and mailed them off on Monday. However, when I got to the post office, I realized that I could not remember my boyfriend’s mailing address.

This might seem weird, but I don’t really mail him that many things, and he currently lives a half hour drive away, and I don’t have a car, so I’ve only been to his place once (and he’s lived there less than 6 months). Also, I don’t have a cell phone, so I couldn’t call him from the post office.

So I guessed. Unfortunately, as I realized when I got back to my office and called Donald from my office phone, I guessed wrong. However, I knew which wrong address I’d sent the cookies to (another house on the same block), so Donald said he would walk over and let them know that he would be receiving a package at that address, addressed to him.

Well, he went over twice, and the old lady who answered the door both times claimed that the package never showed up! Hmm….

I hope she ate them, at least. I’d hate to think they’d gone entirely to waste.

What is it with the woman at the deli counter? She always comes over after I’ve been standing there for a minute or two, trying in vain to make eye contact with an employee, and says, “Are you all set?”

If I were all set, why would I be standing there in front of the deli counter?

A close second in annoyingness is when you’re talking to someone on the phone, and they say, “Well, I guess I should let you go.”* Isn’t that like saying, “It’s not you, it’s me” when you break up with someone?

Maybe next time I’m on the phone with someone and they say “I should let you go,” I should say: “Oh, that’s okay. I still have time to talk. No need to hang up on my account.”

Oh, and I’d like some prosciutto. While you’re at it.

* I didn’t realize how annoying this was until my friend Jessica pointed it out. Now I concentrate really hard on making sure *I* don’t say it at the end of the conversation.