Latest ETSY Treasury.......

My latest Treasury with my favorite color:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=102695


http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id102695

Prepper: Are YOU one??

http://www.newsweek.com/id/228428


http://www.americanpreppersnetwork.com/


http://www.whatisaprepperblogspot.com

Oh my favorite columnist's latest.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/opinion/19sat4.html


December 19, 2009

EDITORIAL NOTEBOOK

Darcy at Her Days’ End

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Not quite 15 years ago, my wife adopted a mixed-breed puppy she found tied to a storage tank behind a gas station in Great Barrington, Mass. I say she adopted it because I wasn’t quite sold on the idea. We had a new pup already — a border terrier named Tavish — and this gangly new addition looked, in comparison, like a badly made dog. Darcy’s feet were too small for her body, her hind knees were weak, and her coat made her look like a wire-haired golden retriever. But who ever loved a dog less because it was ugly?

•

And now, suddenly, it’s all these years later. Darcy still lies on the lawn, basking like a lioness, and barks at the pickups going up the road. Much of the day she still has the look of an indomitably gratified mutt. But there are hours now when her eyes, a little misty with cataracts, seem worried, hollow. And she has stopped eating, or rather, she eats with deliberation and reluctance, a spoonful of this, a forkful of that.

Which means that now is the time for a hard decision. According to the vet, there are no signs of disease, other than the disease of age — nothing to force our hand. When Tavish died, four years ago, his liver was failing, and there was no choice but to sit on the floor and hold him while the vet inserted the final needle. It’s somehow not surprising that Darcy raises the matter of our responsibility in its purest form.

I’ve known too many owners who waited far too long to put their dogs to sleep, and I’ve always hated the sentimentality and the selfishness in their hesitation. Last week, watching Darcy out in the sun, it felt as though I was trying to decide just when most of the life — the good life, that is — inside her has been used up. Is it conscionable to wait until it’s plainly gone? Or is it better to err on the side of saying goodbye while she’s still discernibly Darcy, while she seems, as she nearly always does, to be without pain?



It comes down, in the end, to the pleasure she shows, the interest she takes in the world around her — and not to anything her humans feel. She has not had the life she might once have expected — a far better one instead. My job is to make sure she gets the death she deserves — in her human’s arms.

And so she has. She died quietly last Friday while I sat on the floor beside her at the vet’s. The world is a poorer place without her.

Media: The End Of Hand Crafted Content??

by Michael Arrington on December 13, 2009

Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, theNYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc.

Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters,Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is toleave those brands and do their own thing.

But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.

Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. They can’t make a business in that world, they say, so they run the other way and try to find a way to protect and charge for content.

These are the cavemen, or whoever, who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied.

For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction. And the aggregators like TechMeme can figure out who broke the news. Page views are lost, butreputation is gained.

But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn’t a copyright issue – the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it’s far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it – if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.

But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.

My advice to readers is just this – get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes.

Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/13/the-end-of-hand-crafted-content/

A Fish Story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/opinion/16greenberg.html?_r=1

Latest Etsy Treasury: Home....If Only in Your Dreams

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=99438

Under the Tuscan Sun:

One of countless favorite films: Under the Tuscan Sun.

Dream Ranch du Jour:

WYOMING  CODY, WYO. - Lot, 7 – 10 acres, in this large-acre subdivision located minutes from downtown Cody.  Great views of mountains, underground utilities, and paved roads.  Great horse property, priced to sell starting at $105,900. Come build your dream.  Agent-owned. Contact Ann Flack, 307-250-7369, ann@codywyomingproperties.com, www.codywyomingproperties.com. The Donley Team Real Estate Group.

Laugh du Jour: Snow Dog. (Coffee Warning..)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sUL0KCIc48&feature=related

Trading In Your Old Threads on the Web.....

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/tradin-in-your-old-threads-on-the-web/?emc=eta1

I wonder if this will take off among Baby Boomers?

Etsy Treasury: A Winter Walk in the Woods....

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=98645

In addition to world peace? Please Santa, how about a walk in the woods?

I LOVE the WOODS!

Extraordinary Artist and Kind, Thoughtful Lady....PastelOriginals at Etsy.

www.PastelOriginals.etsy.com

My blood pressure dropped ten points as I browsed through Melanie's shop.

Some of my favorites:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=32148306

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=32462301

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=31986819

Love this: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=32410515

Reminds me of an Ivan Doig novel:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=32156571

I would Live Here........Krakow, Poland

I would change the orange and green colors to purples and blues, but this is a way cool bedroom. I would also take out the leather sofa and add a love seat with cashmere or other very soft throws on it.

Look at that brick arched ceiling!

I would also put Native American and other fine art on the walls.

Okay, now I'm done redecorating. ;-)

Best Christmas Lights............

http://www.americasbestonline.net/christmas.htm

http://christmas.bronners.com/

http://www.break.com/index/amazing-christmas-light-display1.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgf60CI_ks

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Latest......When the Wind Stops...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/opinion/03thu4.html

December 3, 2009

EDITORIAL | THE RURAL LIFE

When the Wind Stops

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

This farm lies on an eastward-facing slope, which rises gradually to a thickly wooded ridge in the west. I can feel the mass of that hill whenever the sun goes down, and yet, where wind is concerned, there’s very little lee to it. Last week, the wind came ripping over the crest, knocking down a couple of fence sections and gnawing at the trees with a suctioning, siphoning sound. All day long, the air boomed and roared.

By evening, even the horses were weary. They had been blown about all day as though they weighed a few ounces instead of a thousand pounds apiece. A tree cracks in the distance and they trot, alarmed, across the pasture. A whirlwind of leaves twists past, and they race away from it. The corner of a tarp gets loose, and off they go. They transmit this anxious energy to me, undiluted. I prefer the way the pigs and chickens react. In a high wind, the pigs snooze together at the back of their house, straw pulled over their heads. The chickens sit on their perches, knitting and doing their accounts.

Sometime during the night, the wind dropped and the next morning was nearly still, smoke rising almost straight up from my chimney and from those down the valley. There was a strange sense of propriety about, a primness in the way every tree had relaxed and, at the same time, come back to attention. In this new silence, the horses seemed enveloped in stillness. They were no longer bracing themselves. Their bones and sinews had relaxed.

And I relaxed, too. I stood in the sun feeling the strength of its rays now that the wind wasn’t scattering them. When the wind blows, the horses always stand with their heads facing away from it. In the quiet of the morning, they were no longer magnetized. Without a wind, they were free to face in any direction they chose. Without a wind, the day could go any way it wanted.

But, Sarah, what do you *really* think?

  http://jalopnik.com/5416549/daughter-of-resigned-gm-ceo-attacks-new-gm-ceo-on-facebook

Photo du Jour: Saving Grace..............

Inspiring piece....FDR's 100 Days...

http://100days.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/how-fdr-made-the-presidency-matter/?ref=opinion

February 1, 2009  Economic View

 Recession Can Change a Way of Life

 By TYLER COWEN  AS job losses mount and bailout costs run into the trillions, the social costs of the economic downturn become clearer. The primary question, to be sure, is what can be done to shorten or alleviate these bad times. But there is also a broader set of questions about how this downturn is changing our lives, in ways beyond strict economics.   All recessions have cultural and social effects, but in major downturns the changes can be profound. The Great Depression, for example, may be regarded as a social and cultural era as well as an economic one. And the current crisis is also likely to enact changes in various areas, from our entertainment habits to our health.   First, consider entertainment. Many studies have shown that when a job is harder to find or less lucrative, people spend more time on self-improvement and relatively inexpensive amusements. During the Depression of the 1930s, that meant listening to the radio and playing parlor and board games, sometimes in lieu of a glamorous night on the town. These stay-at-home tendencies persisted through at least the 1950s.   In today’s recession, we can also expect to turn to less expensive activities — and maybe to keep those habits for years. They may take the form of greater interest in free content on the Internet and the simple pleasures of a daily walk, instead of expensive vacations and N.B.A. box seats.   In any recession, the poor suffer the most pain. But in cultural influence, it may well be the rich who lose the most in the current crisis. This downturn is bringing a larger-than-usual decline in consumption by the wealthy.   The shift has been documented by Jonathan A. Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgenson, finance professors at Northwestern University, in their recent paper, “Who Bears Aggregate Fluctuations and How? Estimates and Implications for Consumption Inequality.” Of course, people who held much wealth in real estate or stocks have taken heavy losses. But most important, the paper says, the labor incomes of high earners have declined more than in past recessions, as seen in the financial sector.   Popular culture’s catering to the wealthy may also decline in this downturn. We can expect a shift away from the lionizing of fancy restaurants, for example, and toward more use of public libraries. Such changes tend to occur in downturns, but this time they may be especially pronounced.   Recessions and depressions, of course, are not good for mental health. But it is less widely known that in the United States and other affluent countries, physical health seems to improve, on average, during a downturn. Sure, it’s stressful to miss a paycheck, but eliminating the stresses of a job may have some beneficial effects. Perhaps more important, people may take fewer car trips, thus lowering the risk of accidents, and spend less on alcohol and tobacco. They also have more time for exercise and sleep, and tend to choose home cooking over fast food.   In a 2003 paper, “Healthy Living in Hard Times,” Christopher J. Ruhm, an economist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, found that the death rate falls as unemployment rises. In the United States, he found, a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, on average, decreases the death rate by 0.5 percent.   David Potts studied the social history of Australia in the 1930s in his 2006 book, “The Myth of the Great Depression.” Australia’s suicide rate spiked in 1930, but overall health improved and death rates declined; after 1930, suicide rates declined as well.   While he found in interviews that many people reminisced fondly about those depression years, we shouldn’t rush to conclude that depressions are happy times.   Many of their reports are likely illusory, as documented by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling book “Stumbling on Happiness.” According to Professor Gilbert, people often have rosy memories of very trying periods, which may include extreme poverty or fighting in a war.   In today’s context, we are also suffering fear and anxiety for the rather dubious consolation of having some interesting memories for the distant future.   But this downturn will likely mean a more prudent generation to come. That is implied by the work of two professors, Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stefan Nagel of the Stanford Business School, in a 2007 paper, “Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking?”   A generation that grows up in a period of low stock returns is likely to take an unusually cautious approach to investing, even decades later, the paper found. Similarly, a generation that grows up with high inflation will be more cautious about buying bonds decades later.  IN other words, today’s teenagers stand less chance of making foolish decisions in the stock market down the road. They are likely to forgo some good business opportunities, but also to make fewer mistakes.   When all is said and done, something terrible has happened in the United States economy, and no one should wish for such an event. But a deeper look at the downturn, and the social changes it is bringing, shows a more complex picture.   In addition to trying to get out of the recession — our first priority — many of us will be making do with less and relying more on ourselves and our families. The social changes may well be the next big story of this recession.   Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/business/01view.html

Tattle Trails: Great Old Broads for Wilderness

Tattle Trails: Great Old Broads for Wilderness  By Beth Baker, March & April 2009  A group of hikers with cameras finds a way to keep vehicles from ruining the West's wildest lands    As lightning streaked the canyon and rain drummed on the red-rock walls of Recapture Wash, Ronni Egan and Rose Chilcoat took shelter under a ledge, delighting in the meteorological drama before them. "Does anyone not feel alive?" shouted Chilcoat after a deafening clap of thunder.  Egan, 63, and Chilcoat, 50, lead Great Old Broads for Wilderness (970-385-9577): 3,600 women (and a few hundred men) who put hiking boots to the ground and take a stand for Mother Nature by monitoring abuses of public lands. Recapture Wash in southeastern Utah is one area they watch. There, using Global Positioning System devices and digital cameras, the group has been documenting damage to vegetation and streambeds by all-terrain vehicles. The pictures have paid off: the Bureau of Land Management closed a trail that ATV enthusiasts had dynamited out of rock perilously close to 800-year-old cliff dwellings.  "We're not against off-road vehicles—or grazing cattle or oil derricks," says Egan, the group's executive director. "There's enough room for everybody. But some of these things are just so destructive, they shouldn't be allowed in certain environments." The Broads have worked to limit snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park and to establish Wild Sky Wilderness in Washington State.  On this visit to the wash, Egan and Chilcoat were pleased to see the canyon recovering. The air was pungent with juniper and sage. A wren's song cascaded in the breeze, and the cliff face bloomed with sunflowers, blue asters, and scarlet gilia. Says Egan of the landscape: "It's my shrink, my church, my meditation. When I'm out here, everything else goes away."  “You do what you can, and you're glad to know there are still wild places.”  Egan had never led anything but horseback trips from her family's dude ranch in New Mexico before taking the reins of the Broads in 2002. The group, based in Durango, Colorado, got its start in 1989 after some older hikers took exception to a remark by Utah senator Orrin Hatch. He opined that the United States shouldn't designate more land as wilderness, because the elderly wouldn't have access. Now the Broads have 22 chapters—called Broadbands—in nine states.  "We're not enforcers," says Egan. "We're the evidence-gathering arm of the environmental movement." And though staunch advocates for wild places, they seek common ground rather than confrontation. When Egan and Chilcoat, a former U.S. park ranger and the group's second in command, invited a New Mexico state legislator and rancher to sit down and talk," he said, 'I don't get why you're inviting the enemy to dinner,' " Egan recalls. Yet they found that despite differences over desert grazing, they shared concerns about contaminated water from oil and gas exploration. Membership – Join, renew, or learn about exclusive AARP member benefits.  Egan spends at least one week each month outdoors, on monitoring trips or camping. By the end of their recent foray, Egan and Chilcoat had jostled for hours over winding roads and waded calf-deep through a muddy flash flood. Word of a mountain lion in the vicinity only added to the excitement. "Icing on the cake," says Egan.  "Backs fail, knees fail, the body might not do anymore what it did," Chilcoat notes, "but you do what you can, and you're glad to know there are still wild places.    http://www.aarpmagazine.org/people/great_old_broads_for_wilderness.html

Gorgeous Photos: Michael Jordon

http://www.michael-gordon.com/   http://www.michael-gordon.com/links.php

Two Cool URLs du Jour

http://www.davidstanleyphotography.com/landscape_gallery.html   http://carlantapp.com/as/index.html   Check out Ancestral Spirit and especially Socialization of the Western Landscape and turn on your speakers......  Enjoy!

Absolutely Fabulous URL, Talk about image and info rich!

http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect6/Sect6_7.html

The best artichoke soup: DUARTS IN PESCADERO, CA

The BEST Artichoke soup......

I used to get Cream of Artichoke soup and Cream of Green Chile soup and mix the two together!   http://www.duartestavern.com/menu.html   http://www.duartestavern.com/

The COMPASSION of OAK TREES................

July 6, 2008 Landscape Artist By HOLLY MORRIS Skip to next paragraph THE WILD PLACES By Robert Macfarlane. Illustrated. 340 pp. Penguin Books. Paper, $15. Robert Macfarlane is looking for his wild in England, Ireland and Wales, territory that for most of us evokes words like “manicured,” “turf” or, at the very least, “domesticated.” His book about a series of pilgrimages to the moors, islands, lochs, capes and holloways that season the British Isles might seem quaint or even confusing (a holloway?) to those whose notion of wildness demands “rock, altitude and ice,” as he puts it. Yet “The Wild Places” is anything but twee. It is a formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence — poetry, really — with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach far transcend the physical region he explores. The same quiet optimism that inhabited his previous book, “Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination,” makes Macfarlane unwilling to accept the “obituaries for the wild” put out by today’s eco-punditry. Only occasionally does he cite examples of current environmental peril, like the minke whale that washed up on the Normandy coast in 2002 with nearly a ton of plastic packaging and shopping bags in its stomach. He leapfrogs certain aspects of the moment in pursuit of deeper, older truths. Macfarlane sets out to create an unconventional map — a cartography not subject to the imperialisms of roadways or humanity or grid, but rather, a prose map that would “seek to make some of the remaining wild places of the archipelago visible again, or that would record them before they vanished for good. ... It would link headlands, cliffs, beaches, mountaintops, tors, forests, river mouths and waterfalls.” Tree climbing is a preferred methodology. The 10- or 20-foot elevation (as well as all that he learns on the way up) gives Macfarlane precious perspective. At the outset, from his roost in a beech tree near his home in Cambridge, he experiences “the relief of relief” and explains tree climbing as “a way of defraying the city’s claim” on him, though it was not an experience of “wild” as he originally defines it. Wild requires isolation, the elements, a stepping “outside human history,” he tells us. The more than a dozen accounts of starry sleep-outs, freezing tramps and phosphorescent swims — at places like the valley of Coruisk on the Isle of Skye and the summit of Ben Hope in Scotland — are ripe with scholarship and pleasantly egoless. The natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane’s devoted observations, which can be both minutely detailed and vast in scope. Few can finesse, as he does, the lickety-split life cycle of a midge and the grandiosity of lumbering geologic eras into the space of a couple of sentences. But his natural world is not all creatures and weather and gratitude for the moonlight that traveled 93 million miles to give him “an eyeful of silver” as he watched his moon-shadow jig on an icy ridge. As often as not, the landscapes are tilled with human histories. Macfarlane camps on the Welsh island of Ynys Enlli, where, starting around A.D. 500, Celtic monks called peregrini began crossing treacherous waters to retreat and “achieve correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes” — to “consider infinitude.” While in Ireland, he offers a wrenching account of the potato famine. But death is not only in the land and the past, but in the present tense of the book. Brain cancer swiftly claims Macfarlane’s friend and sometime companion on these journeys, Roger Deakin. Deakin was a writer who deepened Macfarlane’s notion of wildness and taught him, among many things, about the compassion of oak trees, which spring to action and “share nutrients via their root systems” when one of their clan is ailing. Literary prophets also haunt Macfarlane’s outings. For W. H. Auden, he says while noting the particular erosions of the limestone slabs near the Burren in Ireland, “this was a human as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone an honesty — an acknowledgment that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.” Ideas about wildness change. Macfarlane’s original plan — to find and map stashes of untouched wild — isn’t panning out. That “chaste land” in the British Isles doesn’t exist (ah, we were right!), and he comes to believe that the human and the wild cannot be mutually exclusive. He now feels that his “old sense of the wild was to an ideal of tutelary harshness” and geologic past. Meanwhile, down in the gryke he notices some lusty new vegetable life, bristling with “nowness,” existing in a “constant and fecund present.” Macfarlane ultimately sees wildness as “not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac.” Back straddling the limb of his beechwood, having come full circle, he considers his journeys: “A webbing of story and memory joined up my places, as well as other more material affinities. The connections made by all of these forces — rocks, creatures, weathers, people — had laid new patterns upon the country, as though it had been swilled in a developing fluid, and unexpected images had emerged, ghostly figures showing through the mesh of roads and cities.” The wild, now a quality of organic vigor that lives in his urban beechwood as much as on remote summits, “prefaced us, and it will outlive us,” he writes. And it hones our faith. For those of us disinclined toward religion — we who find our values, our hereafter, our happiness in the rhythms, the “fizz and riot” of the natural world — Macfarlane’s map, which is this book, is a kindred, bewitching tract. And like the wild it parses, it quietly returns us to ourselves. Holly Morris is the author of “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine” and a host for the National Geographic television documentary series “Treks in a Wild World.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/books/review/Morris-t.html

Cabin in Provo, Utah for HOW MUCH?

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/12/01/greathomesanddestinations/1202-wyg_17.html

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/12/01/greathomesanddestinations/1202-wyg_23.html

Laundry Room as Library

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/nyregion/01bigcity.html

December 1, 2009

BIG CITY

Saving the Planet and Expanding the Mind

By SUSAN DOMINUS

My old neighbors in Washington Heights were marvels of resourcefulness, natural born recyclers inspired by thrift, as opposed to love of the environment. One of them regularly used to head down to the laundry room to polish off a load and come back with some rescued treasure.

From an informal dumping ground in the basement of a six-story elevator building, he and his partner salvaged dilapidated dining room chairs, at least one coffee table and a few lamps, eventually filling their apartment with these castoffs, on which they demonstrated, it must be said, an immodest love of decoupage.

Frequent entertainers and informal networkers, the couple did not just welcome their neighbors into their home, they welcomed other people’s homes into their home, linking one private space to another through things moving in time.

Green Metropolis, a recent book by David Owen, a writer for The New Yorker, makes the counterintuitive argument that the New York City lifestyle is about as environmentally friendly as they come, given that so many New Yorkers live car-free and packed into energy-conserving apartments.

But Mr. Owen overlooks the recycling that many of the city’s apartment-dwellers do via a basement laundry room or similar space. That is where many of our beloved vertical neighborhoods create a zero-waste zone, a trading post for things that their owners no longer love but think surely someone else should: all that barely nicked furniture, gadgets replaced by newer models, old pots and, maybe particularly in New York, an endless deluge of books.

At my former home in Washington Heights, I read the narrative of some unidentified young couple through the titles that accumulated in our makeshift laundry-room library: first “The Fertility Diet,” then several months later, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and finally a slew of baby-naming books. (Perhaps they were also the ones who, realistically enough, unloaded all their Let’s Go travel guides to various countries in Asia.)

One can imagine finding, in the basements of certain Park Avenue or TriBeCa buildings, a collection of jettisoned tomes that speak to a particular moment in history: “The Complete Guide to Buying Properties in France” followed by, perhaps, “The Credit Risks of Complex Derivatives.”

A glance through the laundry-room stacks provides a point of entry into lives that sometimes seem opaque, for all that proximity. It’s illuminating to know that someone else, someone very close by, shares a passion for Graham Greene or Star Trek or aspires to play blackjack like the pros.

At 169 East 69th Street, an understated but elegant co-op between Lexington and Third Avenues, the laundry-room library has been elevated to something approximating a formal sitting room. There are nine or so bookshelves double-stacked with books, and two bamboo chairs in orange, with cushions in a dusky peach plaid, have been arranged around a demilune table. Behind it hangs an oil painting of a bouquet of flowers. Across from the chairs is a wooden bench, rescued, most likely, from one of the terraces high above. Across from all of that, the hulking white washers and dryers do their drudgery.

Harriet Krausman, a resident of 16 years, has her own laundry machines upstairs in her apartment, but regularly traipses down to the basement to pick up mysteries or fiction. She usually returns them when she’s finished, and sometimes pauses to think for a few minutes on one of those comfortable chairs and contemplate her choice.

On Monday, Ms. Krausman and her husband, Gabriel, a retired appellate judge, sat in those chairs and asked Richard Block, a maintenance worker at the building with a tiny gold cross in his ear, which of the library’s books he had enjoyed lately. A biography of Moshe Dayan, Mr. Block said, and that book about Zimbabwe with the word crocodile in the title. (A little sleuthing on Amazon.com revealed that to be Peter Godwin’s memoir, “When A Crocodile Eats the Sun.”)

“I’m a history buff,” explained Mr. Block, who lives in Queens and has worked in the building for 21 years.

Francis Dosne, a retired Nestlé executive, said he had recently borrowed and returned Warren Buffett’s biography. Augusto Navarette, a doorman, opened the front-desk’s drawer to reveal what he had been browsing from downstairs: “The Leakeys: Uncovering the Origins of Mankind.”

Originally just a pile of books like those in so many other building basements, the library became a library about six years ago, when a superintendent put in some shelves.

Now the books just keep coming. They come from residents who cannot bear to throw them away, good books, and in good condition. It’s as if the building has a book club — the kind in which the members never actually had to talk about what they’d read.

“Now the only problem is where to put the next shelves,” said Mr. Krausman. “We’ll have to get rid of the laundry machines.” Or at least the dryers. Books are one thing, but clotheslines — that’s maybe even a better way to get to know your neighbors.