It’s not a big a problem as it could be, since our back yard is fenced and that’s where the kids play. But I do worry that having these stray dogs there will inspire our dog to try to leave the yard whenever we open the gate.

I’ve contemplated calling animal control about them, but these are wily dogs who only appear when animal control is closed. And I am just tender-hearted enough to dislike the idea of sending them to a kill shelter when they are clearly just worn-out old stray dogs who enjoy the shade in our yard. So mostly, I’m just annoyed by them with no real way to resolve the situation.

Today, we drove up into the drive and the 4yo and I had a discussion that offered some alternative ideas.

Me: I’m so annoyed. Look, those dogs are here again.
4yo: I hate them!
Me: Do they bother you too? [Thinking, I am going to have to do something about this. We can't have the 4yo being scared at his own house.]
4yo: Yes. I don’t like them.
Slight pause.
4yo, with the enthusiasm born of a brilliant idea: Maybe we can have Sally fight them! [Sally is our 14yo, very slow, gentle, and passive dog. No aggressive. Just passive.]
Me: I don’t think that’s a good idea somehow.
4yo: I know! We can have those two dogs go chase a CAT! [With such enthusiasm, again, that it was clear the point was to catch and dismember the cat.]

Let me know if you need a new perspective on your situation. We can rent him out.

So much so that for years, I’ve taunted friends who moved to Williamson County when their kids turned 5. [It's a real phenomenon.] Talked about how white-bread our southern neighbor is. How these friends were giving up, taking the easy way out.

Yet now, I am trying hard to figure out a good reason to stay in Davidson County, and I’m having trouble coming up with one. I’m just going to put this out there in hopes that you can help. Tell me where I’m wrong.

No one would argue that our education spending is anemic. In fact, it’s pretty good. But we have a student population with significant challenges in our county’s public schools, challenges which require greater funding. We have a high English language learner population. The poverty rate among Davidson County public schoolchildren is dramatically higher than the county’s rate, because so many middle and upper class families aren’t in the public schools. Last year’s budget woes eliminated real classroom teachers, not just theoretical teaching positions. While I am sometimes encouraged by Dr. Register’s work, I see too many daily examples of poor decisionmaking in the Metro schools to remain heartened for long. And, I have a 5th grader, a 4yo and a 6 month old. So this remains my personal problem for at least 18 more years.

Right now, my family lives 1 1/2 blocks outside [OK I'm biased; the 10yo is a proud graduate] of the best elementary school zone in Davidson County. We were in the zone when I bought the house — that’s why I bought it. Zone changed the next year. I am not even remotely comfortable with what I’m hearing or reading about the school we are zoned for, though I do still need to check it out in person.

A larger problem is that our family is too big for our house. Our 3 kids are spaced just so in gender and age that it would really be best for each to have his or her own bedroom. And in our hip, urban neighborhood, homes with 4 bedrooms are still awfully expensive, even in this economy. For several years now, you’ve been able to get more house for your money in certain parts of Green Hills and definitely in Bellevue, and that’s still the case.

And so for a while, I thought we’d just have to move to the southwestern part of the county. It’s not hip nor nearly so urban, but still not too far out, and we’d get the house our family needed. In a good school district.

But lately? I am trying to wrap my head around it, but I think it makes more sense to move to Brentwood. Here’s why:
* Good schools. Period.
* Good housing value for the dollar is available in some parts of northern Williamson County.
* I don’t hear any bitching in Williamson County about spending on parks and schools. From the outside, those “amenities” of the community seem to be highly valued by a large part of the population.
* They aren’t talking about mortgaging the city or county’s future on a convention center that is difficult to demonstrate the concrete value of. No doubt making it even more difficult to spend on parks and schools in the future than it is now.

There are some downsides, for sure. I’ll be a political minority, but I get along with most everyone. I do know all my elected officials here, and that is nice, but when the awfully smart folks I vote for aren’t able to stop these fool-headed actions by others, I guess that’s not doing me a lot of good, is it?

Sorry if I sound kind of depressed about this. I’m not really — I’m annoyed. Annoyed that housing prices are so high in this neighborhood I love. [It's happened since the local school opened and was immediately so wonderful.] Annoyed that our Metro government is so obsessed with this convention center. Annoyed that my realistic choice is moving so far away.

So I’ve deleted the Yahoo group, and we’re back in business at the old location:
http://groups.google.com/group/East-Nashville

What I learned:

• Google is not a benevolent dictator. It’s a bit of an oblivious bully. That sounds contradictory, but over the 10 days or so I was dealing with this mess, I saw both clueless and churlish behavior on the part of Google’s representatives. Neither impressed me.
• Apparently there’s a decent chunk of the web-going population out there who believes that Google retaliates against its critics, as well. So if I suddenly stop appearing in Google search results, I guess we’ll all know why. I’m not quite that much of a conspiracy theorist, myself.
• More people than I could hope to personally thank helped spread the word about the list situation. My gratitude to you all!

After the fiasco that Google Groups created for us over the weekend, I received so many kind emails and phone calls from folks wanting to help — to help fight Google, and to ensure we restore our group. Thank you all — it means a lot to me that so many neighbors feel the same way I do about the East Nashville list.

I did a lot of research the past couple of days. I was really hoping to find a PHP-based forum software that I could host myself, that would have the same or better features offered by Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups. To avoid this sort of wackiness in the future.

In the end, I decided there were two insurmountable problems with this approach:

• I couldn’t find a popular [that is, widely used and therefore well supported] but inexpensive software that included the option to email all posts, and to post by email, thus preserving the original email list concept that so many of our group still enjoyed.
• One REALLY important thing that Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups do is handle email deliverability issues. If you’re not in the web industry, this may not mean a lot to you. But the short version is, ANY email can be marked as spam by someone else’s email server, and Google and Yahoo! have relationships with ISPs and other Internet entities that make their emails far more “deliverable” than your average email.

So, I decided that moving the group to Yahoo! is the right decision.

[FYI, thanks to all who shared information and offered to help with Google. It is just a dead issue as far as I'm concerned -- they have not responded to my several contact attempts, and I'm truly not surprised by that. Google seems to operate as if it doesn't need any individual customer. A strange business model to my mind, but I was already aware of their attitude. Caveat emptor, I suppose.]

I am inviting everyone who’s emailed me to join the new East Nashville list, but Yahoo! only allows 50 invitations every day or two. So, please spread the word that it’s easy to join the list right this minute by sending a blank email to eastnashville-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or by visiting the group
home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eastnashville.

Once you’re in, you can post by emailing eastnashville@yahoogroups.com.

Thanks for being an important part of East Nashville!

I am working to find out if there’s actually anyone at Google I can ASK about this [they are notorious for not actually having customer service], or if it’s a moot point.

By 7/5, I will decide if it’s time to cut bait and make a new start for the list. Watch my blog and Facebook page for updates! And please, spread the word.

I do NOT have a list of group members. I would love to collect one, so if you were on the East Nashville list and would like to remain on it, please email me at lcreekmo@gmail.com with “East Nashville list” in the subject line. I will not reply to all immediately, but I will collect your address and let you know the minute I’ve figured out a solution.

After getting called out by the list administrator any number of times [no names to protect the guilty], some of us decided it would be nice to have another list, one for debate, discussion and general carrying on. Because as a neighborhood, we just didn’t get to do that enough at the local restaurant [we weren't the coffee-shop-haven that we are now] and the neighborhood association meetings. So I started one.

For years, it sat quite contentedly at around 300 members. Well, “content” is not the right concept. It was vibrant and lively. We were solving the problems of the world. Then a few years ago, it had edged up to around 750 members, and the Tennessean did a feature story on neighborhood lists. Within two months, we reached 1500 members. This year, we hit 3000.

We’ve been on the Google Groups platform for a number of years. It’s a nice, easy platform to use, and it allows me to moderate the first post of any group member — thus catching untold amounts of spam and letting me ban spammers before they can bother the group. Google did NOT, however, allow me to moderate pages and files — it only allowed me to either post pages and files myself, or allow anyone in the group to do so. Thus, I spent a lot of time deleting porn spam from both areas, until I finally turned them both off this week.

I have no idea if that’s related to what happened to our group or not. This week, Google reset its spam filters, and for some reason, the East Nashville group triggered the filters. They gave me the option to re-submit the site for review, so I did. Then this morning, they deleted the group. No warning. No communication. Nada.

Now, first of all, it says quite clearly in their Terms of Service that they can delete your group anytime. So I’m not arguing they did anything they didn’t warn me about in advance. But as a marketing tactic, Google’s approach fails on every level. They are the 800-lb. gorilla, but there are other options out there for a lot of their services, and I can’t imagine why they think it’s a good idea to anger people who work on web strategy for a living. I get it, I’m a tiny peon compared to the mighty Google. But seriously? This is how you treat the world?

I’m looking for a better solution for my neighborhood list, and spreading the word to re-compile my group. Still waiting to hear from Google. Not holding my breath.

But seriously, I get tired of the finger-wagging when I’m not doing anything wrong. Crossing guards don’t like me as a pedestrian or as a driver, because I insist on the significantly lower standards of “what’s legal” and “what’s reasonable and proper,” as opposed to their dictatorial mandates, which are more along the lines of “how much can I make you do.”

This morning, we turned the corner near my daughter’s elementary school. This corner is a half block from the crossing guard, who stands at the next corner. Since we were coming off a full stop at the turn, we never approached 15 mph. But from the moment I turned, the guard was blowing her whistle full steam and shaking her hand at me to stop. As we got closer to the actual crosswalk, I could see she was also furrowing her eyebrows and generally giving me the evil eye. Since I was slowing from my already turtle pace to stop, I have no idea why. We actually knew the people crossing the street, and my pedestrian friend and I shrugged our shoulders at each other.

I get into trouble with the other crossing guard at school pretty frequently as well. Seems that when I’m a pedestrian, I insist on crossing the street when no cars are coming — but she hasn’t yet noticed that I want to cross, or that it’s safe to do so, or stepped into the street to “help” me with her ever-present whistle. That doesn’t make her happy.

I am sure this is actually a challenging job at times. There are kids who dash into the street. There are cars that literally zoom through the school zone. But I drive the same way to school at the same time every day. We’ve had the same crossing guards for several months now, after a lot of turnover last school year. And in general, are moms in minivans your problem drivers? I don’t get the anger at a driver and sometime pedestrian who’s not doing anything wrong or dangerous. Shouldn’t you save it for the person who barrels by at 23 or something?

Back on point: We’ve gotten a lot done in the garden in the last 10 days or so, but very little of it is finished, or more importantly for our purposes here, fun to look at.

We’re a little less than half done building a brick path around the garden. It’s somewhere around 1 3/4′ wide all around the inside of the fence. We’ve just been scavenging bricks from various folks in the neighborhood who are doing projects. I have to say, it’s one advantage of living in an older area — there’s rarely a shortage of people tearing up old sidewalks and/or cleaning out basements and discovering big stashes of bricks. I don’t know what people living in the suburbs do when they need a bunch of free bricks.

The path work has been slow and painful, but mostly because I started on the hardest side. Once we finish the north edge, the rest should be a lot faster. When I bought this house 4 years ago, half of the backyard was gravel. I don’t mean pea gravel or paths. I mean, gravel like a driveway. Even worse, it wasn’t in the driveway area, which was nicely paved. The gravel was just in the yard.

Now, don’t get me started on the crazy guy who used to own this house. Let’s suffice it to say, that was just one of the unusual features I’ve since updated. In the case of the gravel, I paid my regular yard guy and his crew to pull it up and haul it out by hand — wasn’t really possible to use a Bobcat or anything because of the layout of the yard. It took them 2 days. And they put down grass seed and in general, things are lots better. But there are a few areas of the yard that still have a lot of stray gravel. And the north garden path is one of them. So before we can place the bricks, we’ve had to pull out a lot of gravel.

The other interesting thing I’ve found is a full-sized cinder block buried right below the surface on the east path. Maybe 3 inches down. I’ve never dug that far there before, since it was under the path, and not where I plant, but the block had to go if I was going to lay my new-found bricks there.

This is one of those things that you know you should not be doing when you are 30 weeks pregnant, but that you do anyway.

You will be pleased to hear that once I dislodged the block and pulled it out of the hole, I left it there til Ashby got home, and I had him move it out of the way til I can decide how it may be useful.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week beating myself up for not getting things planted faster, but thinking back, I haven’t wasted any good days. There’s just a lot of work to do in your garden in the spring that doesn’t necessarily involve planting anything, and we just haven’t had that many good days yet.

We’re still 3-4 weeks from our last frost date, so the minute things improve outside [cold and rainy again today], I’m slapping some peas in the ground, and more lettuce and spinach. Oh yes. The two things I have gotten planted: Two adorable little lettuce plants. Two days before the sleet this week. I’m scared to go look and I have a lot more lettuce seeds starting inside anyway. And some spinach seeds, which I think will be OK.

ORIGINAL POST: Today is another one of those days I am so proud to live in East Nashville. Our neighborhood has a long history of civic activism, and I was really energized by the overflow crowd at the East Park Community Center for a meeting with MDHA on the riverfront redevelopment plan. To judge by crowd reactions, I believe most left feeling the way I did, ready for action!

The background
In 2007, the Metro Council approved funding for the initial two parts of a plan to redevelop areas of the east and west riverbanks, roughly between the Korean Memorial/Gateway and Woodland Street bridges on the east and corresponding locations on the west [downtown] side of the river. Improvements in the plan were slated in several phases, to facilitate long-term funding and take advantage of the length of time it takes to get the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers when you do anything related to a river channel managed by the Corps, as the Cumberland is.

There are around 20 projects total in the plan, but significant items include:

• Transforming the parking around LP Field into an urban forest, with grass parking and permeable pavement
• Improved and expanded large and small watercraft access on both banks of the river
• Full greenway connections on both riverbanks to existing and planned greenways
• Re-creation of small wetlands areas on both banks that would improve water runoff and the health of the Cumberland
• Improved river event access on the west bank
• River overlook on the west bank
• Amphitheater on the east bank
• Water adventure park on the east bank

The basic order of the original plan, as designed by a team of development experts, calls for the first phase to include the water adventure park [After reviewing the plan today, it makes me think of Chattanooga's aquarium/waterfront park areas, but on steroids.] and a test site for the urban forest. Next phases handle the east and west bank wetlands and greenway development — all of which will involve significant permitting from the Corps — and then the plan wraps up with the complete urban forest.

In accordance with this plan, Metro’s consultants had already completed the schematic for the water park, making it ready to move into the final planning stages and begin development quickly. The council had already allocated money for that phase of development, back in 2007 when the plan was OKed.

And yet to date, nothing has happened.

Today
At today’s public meeting, a couple hundred Nashvillians heard the initial plan sketched out, and then heard a proposed revision to the plan from the Metro Development and Housing Authority, the agency charged with managing such civic projects. The revised plan currently includes all projects in the old plan, but it re-orders them.

New order

• All east bank projects except the water park and urban forest
• All west bank projects
• Water park and urban forest

At first blush, it just sounded like a reshuffling. The reasons given — the state of the economy and the impetus to continue burying power lines on the riverbanks — didn’t quite make any sense to me, especially since the money’s already in place to get started.

The real story
And then we learned from District 6 Council Member Mike Jameson the most important point: There’s no money allocated yet for phase 3. So we’ll likely never see the water park or urban forest if the plan is re-prioritized.

I’m actually skeptical we’ll see any of the project if the new priorities hold, because — and this is just a gut feeling on my part — since permitting for all parts of the plan except the water park and forest require full-blown Corps permits, we won’t have anything happening for at least a year [absolute best case] and more likely, 3-5 years.

I hope you don’t think I’m coming across as one of those East Nashville whiners. I have lived in this neighborhood for almost 14 years, and I’ve seen a decent number of broken promises about development. But this situation just dumbfounds me. The water park isn’t about East Nashville. It’s about creating an amazing civic resource out of a brownfield — the kind of resource that will bring tourists to Nashville, tie in perfectly with the new downtown convention center, and give all Nashvillians a great destination to both enjoy and be proud of. Take a look at the plan on this PDF. Just awesome!

I’m really struggling to understand how you oppose the water park. And the urban forest — the Titans are willing to give it a try, and it would both be more attractive, and dramatically better for the environment than the vast asphalt parking lots on the east bank today.

I got the sense from Ed Owens, the MDHA representative, that MDHA views its role as to implement what the administration directs it to do. So I am anxious to hear directly from Mayor Karl Dean the rationale behind this plan. From what I know now, the revised plan will serve only to kill the riverfront development. I can’t figure out whom that’s going to benefit, but I know it’s not me.

Stay tuned. As I learn more about what’s happening and what we can do, I’ll let you know.

AND: The Tennessean’s report on the meeting.

Nashville’s a bit of a hybrid barbecue town. You can find a little bit of everything here. I have the pleasure to have known many kinds of barbecue, thanks to friends and relatives who live all over the barbecue states. So I’ve had your brisket, your vinegar-base, your heavy, sticky sauce. And while I don’t even often turn down mustard barbecue [but really, South Carolina, is that right? I think not.], my love remains the West Tennessee barbecue of my childhood. A bit of sauce, but not too saucy. Tomatoes and vinegar in the sauce, but not too much of either. You should be tasting the meat here, not the sauce.

So once I happened up to Reggie’s stand, I came back again and again. I even ate barbecue a few times during my two vegetarian stints [first things first, people], and I’d stop by just for some of his fried okra, too. My whole family loved Reggie and his barbecue, even the ones who live out of state. I guess the home-folks connection helped, but the barbecue was critical, too.

My dad and I saw Reggie in the late fall, and he told us he’d had quadruple bypass surgery last summer. When he died, Reggie was 45. Just bad luck in the gene pool is all you can say there, I guess. He was doing well when I saw him this fall, but I understand from a friend he’d been back in the hospital recently.

I just hate this. Reggie was one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet. And he was living his dream with Dee’s Q. I don’t have anything profound to add here. I’m not one to go around saying how this is God’s will or whatever. I think the universe is random and capricious, but most days I’m glad to be part of it. Today’s not one of those days. I am grateful to have known Reggie Crowder. Peace and good barbecue to you, my friend.

Previous posts on Dee’s Q:

• No one cooks when they’re moving
• The last post on barbecue

More people who love Dee’s Q

• The Nashville Scene/Best of Nashville 2008
• The Nashville Scene/Review May 2008 [includes pix of Reggie and his family]