Science News focuses on a study that said urban sprawl can be partly to blame for the average increase in obesity America's seen over the past few decades.

The question, it seems, is selection vs causation:

He and other researchers have evidence that associates health problems with urban sprawl, a loose term for humanmade landscapes characterized by a low density of buildings, dependence on automobiles, and a separation of residential and commercial areas. Frank proposes that sprawl discourages physical activity, but some researchers suggest that people who don't care to exercise choose suburban life. Besides working to settle that disagreement, researchers are looking at facets of urban design that may shortchange health.

My personal theory? "A bit of both."

Yes, people who aren't really interested in exercise might choose places that don't offer them the option to exercise. However, as far as I am aware, most people prefer their neighborhood to have those amenities anyways - it raises property values, for example.

Living in Houston, sprawl is a major problem. The commute I do to and from work every day would have people wondering how it is I manage, back in my hometown of Milwaukee. (With no traffic, it clocks at 20 minutes; with traffic or accidents, up to an hour 30 on a really bad day). There are people who live further out, and some of my co-workers have a minimum 1-hour drive presuming no traffic just to get to work.

In addition, yes, there are other problems caused. The complaint in the article about lack of restaurants in walking distance is a bit silly; if you can't walk, cook your own meal or you'll have to drive. If you're too lazy to cook your own meal or don't know how, you've got bigger problems.

However, a long commute can be draining. Even when you're just sitting in the car, sitting in the car in stop-and-go traffic is draining. You get out of the car feeling tired. Further, a commute that's 45 minutes (as opposed to 10-15) is less time that could theoretically be devoted to exercise, and more importantly, it's 30 minutes of daylight (the time when most people are most active and most likely to exercise) lost. Getting home in the winter months, when it starts getting dark, exercise seems less a priority mentally because it's "already nighttime."

Is the study foolproof? No. Can I see where reason comes in that sprawl might be "a" factor in contributing to obesity? Heck yes.

No idea why or how, but I got locked out of the apartment last week. I'm relatively certain that I didn't lock myself out, so my landlord's must have done it - they live upstairs. The next day it was back to being unlocked.

Now there's a for-rent sign out in front of the house. I'm hoping they mean the house and not the basement.

Or maybe I'm just reeeeeeeally slow on the uptake and they're too passive-aggressive to write a note.

Strang: Oh hey, there's Alex. Maybe he can help us out. Hey man.
RAW: Oh, hey Strang. Hello Quan.
Strang: We're trying to get some money for a combo meal. If you tell me where you live I'll be glad to pay you back.
RAW: Sorry, I've got no cash on me.
Strang: Aww, man. Peace out.
RAW: Later.

The New York Times has a write-up on the "exurb" phenomenon. Much to my surprise, they manage to conceal their contempt! But seriously, it's a good look at it all. I have a couple comments, one aiming for insightful and the other settling for snarky. I found this particular paragraph interesting:

The answer, the company decided, is that a house in New River must be $12,000 cheaper than the same house in the north Tampa suburbs, 15 minutes closer to downtown. And in Silverado, a community that KB hopes to build 15 minutes farther north in Pasco County, the house must be $12,000 cheaper than in New River.

In the greater scheme of things, $12,000 is not all that much money when you're considering a house. Of course, once you add in interest and whatnot, it comes to be more than that, but even so I find it astonishing that people are willing to trade so much time for comparitively so little difference, if all other factors are as equal as the article suggests.

Fifteen minutes farther is 30 minutes a day.
Thirty minutes a day is 150 minutes (2.5 hours) a week.
Two-and-a-half hours a week is 10 hours a month.
Ten hours a month is 120 hours a year over the course of a 30-year loan is 3,600 hours, or 150 days or almost half a year, spent in a car, for the exact same house.

Once you factor in the extra interest that you're paying on the $12,000 price difference (bringing the cost of the house down from $222,000 to $210,000 (on a 7% fixed-rate loan), in this example, here are the savings:

Principal borrowed: $12,000.00
Regular Payment amount: $79.83
Total Repaid: $28739.20
Total Interest Paid: $16738.80

So the savings is almost $80 a month, or $30,000 a year.

That same year, a car that gets 20 miles to the gallon and drives ten extra miles each way (at $2.50/gal) will spend an extra $50 a month in gas.

The result? They've traded almost six months of their life in a car for roughly $30 a month or, over the term of the loan, $11,000.

That, in my mind, is insane.

(If you're interested and particularly anal, I've included my (admittedly general) methodology here: [Read More!]

Now that I am moved in and living in my nice, awesome, great apartment, it's time to whine about it.

I love 99% of this Apartment, I really do. It's better than I imagined my next apartment complex could possibly be. Except one thing.

Next time you see a rat terrior peeing in the park, you are seeing as much water pressure as my shower's got. Crude, but true. It's so bad that I have purchased a bucket for the soul purpose of washing my hair. I have seen a lot of weak showers in my life, but I have never seen one this weak. Ever.

I'm trying to determine whether it's the showerhead or the pipes and am coming to the conclusion that it's a little bit of each. The sink comes out with maybe great dane force. But that would be improvement and the toilet has a decent, unapologetic flush. When I was down in Louisiana I got a showerhead from Eel's Dad. Going to try that and see if it works.

But, to be honest, this apartment is so great that I don't mind my little bucket showers too much.

Things I learned cleaning up and closing out my apartment in Thrifthaven:

• Once upon a time I dated a girl named Lisa. While she was insane to the core, she knew a whole lot about cleaning chemicals. She mentioned that two common cleaning chemicals together can be lethal. I learned that I should write these things down.
• Bleach does a great job of cleaning out toilets.
• If you have bleach in a toilet and you urinate in that toilet, it does weird and interesting things. Remember when Jack Nicholson fell in the vat of acid to become The Joker? Yeah, that kind of reaction.
• I don't recomment doing the above unless you wear pants you're willing to throw away.
• When bleached, navy blue turns - of all colors - pink.
• A very unmanly pink.
• There is probably an evolutionary reason for this, discouraging men to clean by emasculating those that do and therefore adding an additional incentive to find a woman to do his cleaning for him. Don't kill the messenger.
• You know what they say about inhaling too much Tilex and/or bleach and/or Windex? Well, I don't know if they actually say anything about it/them, but if they do it's totally true I swear to you.
• There is no discernable difference between different kinds of Tilex.
• Contacts and Tilex/bleach/Windex fumes do not mix. Unless you hate yourself.
• Unplug the fridge after removing burritos from them.
• The one advantage of having a 12x12' apartment is that there is less to clean.
• The downside to having a 12x12' apartment in Thrifthave is that less stuff to clean seems to take longer.
• There is a long forgotten DC comics character named Terrorsmith. He can't touch anything cause it makes them turn in to monsters. This evening gave me an idea for Bleachsmith, a character who touched bleach and messed up his clothes and therefore is afraid to touch anything else ever again. He is, in fact, looking at his keyboard right now to make sure that the keys thereon are not becoming bleached.
• They are not.

If anyone out there ever wants to see me at my most pathetic, here's a great tip of how to go about it:

Get me to believe, in the process of moving, that my primary data drive is not formatted. Extra points if there is a drive bought expressly for the purpose of backing everything up sitting on the table, waiting for the move to be complete, and even more points if you can somehow arrange it so that my previous backup was accidentally formatted over into a boot drive for another computer.

This sort of thing is happening so much that it's becoming this blog's own cliche.

Turns out that it was another heating issue. Heating and circulation is, lest we forget, one of the main reasons that I'm moving out of Thrifthaven. One reason, but certainly not the only.

Last night, Thrifthaven was crawling with police officers. It seems that the former couple across the way had non-overlapping expectations as to how custody of their little girl would go this week. He seemed more reluctant to leave when she asked him to than she was to call the police and have him escorted off.

I don't now if they usually bring a half-dozen cops to domestic dispute cases or whether it was just a particularly boring evening and none of them had anything better to do. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it wasn't the first time they had to stop by that particular apartment. I've met each member of the couple over the last couple of months and they exude drama. I feel sorry for their neighbor when they were together.

The entire time all of this is occuring, Strang is sitting on his deck chair watching on. Even though they were completely across the way, he appeared to be scared to the point of wetting himself. Not scared enough to go inside, but scared enough to give me the impression that it would be an inopportune time for a drug test, to pick a random example.

But there were some upsides. It turns out that my neighbor Saul the Mumbler has a truck, solving that particular problem. I'd forgotten all about that. Both he and Snowflake - two of the only three second-floor neighbors that were there when I moved in - are vicariously happy for me that I'm getting out. Saul said he's planning to get out, too, but I'm not sure how he's going to be able to afford it. Snowflake is herself packing. She's getting some pretty compehensive back surgery in Idaho Falls. She's quite verbal about her new relationship with God (or is that her relationship with a new God?) and seems happy about her life's new direction.

She's also got about 30 cans of RC Cola in her fridge, courtesy of the roulette dispenser. I'd left my fridge open the previous night so I didn't have a cold coke. I offered her to trade a warm coke for a cold one, but she insisted on giving me a half-dozen cans gratis. I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm never going to slog through all this cola.

• I've got roughly two weeks to get completely moved and no weekends in which to do it (next weekend will be spent out of town.) Posting will be existent, but light. Luckily I don't have a whole lot of stuff to be moved. Unluckily, I've got a lot of cleaning to do. Cleaning up this place will probably take twice as long as moving in to the new one.
• Unlike the old place, the new one is unfurnished. It's funny how you take things like access to a van for granted. In Houston I had my folks', so any time I moved that was taken care of. Up here I have no such luck, so getting furniture shifted around is going to be tough. Camille's landlord may be helping me out and I'm getting my dream desk delivered tomorrow evening.
• I ran across the desk while shopping for some computer parts. There were two 5'x2.5' workbenches for $10 each that were absolutely perfect. But transporting them was an issue and very oddly he would not hold them for me for more than a couple of days even if I paid him up front. Luckily we worked out a deliveryman. I only took one of the benches... I'm thinking that I should have went ahead and got both. I may give the place a call tomorrow.
• Camille saw The Hole over the weekend and loves it. She had reservations about Thrifthaven, but she agrees with me that this will very much be a trade-up. On top of that, I get to stay in the University District, which is very nice.
• Across from Crime Alley is McDonald's. This is not a good thing.
• The Hole is a bit smaller than I remember it being. I had to drag a semi-conscious Camille out to help me plan what was going to go where. She liked it enough that it energized her and we excitedly talked about what was going to go where. And in newly-engaged-couple-fashion, we looked forward to when we get our own place. We actually have very similar aesthetic tastes, which should make that more fun than it would be for other couples.
• Speaking of the engagement thing, it has come in handy for the first time. Reading over the lease agreement, there was a troubling visitors' clause. I spoke with my new landlord about it and she said that since we were engaged, that would fall under the "family" exemption.
• While looking for furniture, I finally checked out the thrift stores in Pocatello. It is extremely dangerous to put me in a thrift shop, but I managed to get out unscathed. I did get a file cabinet, which I very much needed, but that's all. They were selling vintage and working class clothes for $5-10. I went to a coffee shop later in the day where they were selling the same stuff on a fancier rack for $25-50. God Bless America. I was originally at the thrift store looking for a TV stand, but couldn't find any with wheels. Picked up one at Walmart when I was looking for cleaning supplies. I was not as well-behaved at Walmart, racking up a $122 tab.
• I went shopping for cleaning supplies for the Thrifthaven apartment. I got one of just about everything. That might have been two conservative as I might need two of everything to get this place cleaned up. There is the issue with the water that ran non-stop for two months, which hurt the walls. Then there is the bathtub that was clogged for two weeks and I never entirely got that presentable. Part of me thinks I should just say "forget about it" since I may not be getting my deposit back anyhow. Some of this may be uncleanable and I have seven years bad luck from a mirror that broke because the cardboard disintegrated because of the moisture.
• Then again, Strang sold off the furniture to start a fire-hazard meth lab and they let him move back in, so they're the forgiving sort.
• I've decided that now is as good a time as any to start whittling down my wardrobe. Instead of giving my clothes the Goodwill or whatnot, most of my stuff should fit Strang, so I'll cut out the middleman and give him some desperately needed clothes.

My official move-in date is tomorrow, though I'm not sure how exactly that's going to work out. I need to call my landlord tomorrow. My landlord is, interestingly enough, spending the summer in Texas. I'll be living in her (their?) basement. Right now they have some friends housesitting.

Safety-wise, the good news is that it is not Thrifthaven. I will no longer have to be worried about my apartment getting broken in to. I'll get to the bad news in a minute.

I've already dubbed my new place The Hole for somewhat obvious reasons. Unlike a basement apartment I visited prior to moving in to Thrifthaven, this one is nice and tall (except for the stairs down, where at one period I will have to duck. It's a little more spacious, with a kitchen and actual closet space. I've also got a kitchen and a full-size fridge. Most importantly, though, I will have high-speed Internet. My rent will be more, but a little less than I budgeted.

But now the bad news, safety-wise. Behind Thrifthaven is an alley-way that I affectionately call "Crime Alley." It looks more like a little road, but cars generally don't use it unless 4th or 5th Avenue are closed. I think that's why it exists -- so they can close the two most busy streets for construction and still allow people access to homes and stores.

But in any case, that's where my car was parked when Quan broke in to it. It's also where Yale was jumped walking back to the apartment. It's also where The Hole's parking space will be.

The good news is that it's not Thrifthaven. The bad news is that it's only three blocks away.

Fifty Cents is too much to pay for a can of RC Cola.

Ten cents is good.

Eight Cents is better.

Two cents, however, represents the best haul I've ever had.

The odd thing is that I didn't even want a coke, really. I was down there waiting for management to get back so that I could pay the rent. I figured that while I was down there I'd take a spin of the roulette wheel. Why not?

Twenty-four cans. I didn't know the machine held that many. I know I can't hold that many. How am I going to drink them?