I'm pretty ambivalent about self-promotion, but if you think it's a worthwhile honor you can vote for Re/Creating Tampa as Best Local Blog at Creative Loafing's Best of the Bay 2009 (under People and Places). Thanks!

http://bestoftampa.technomile.com/bestoftampa.php

http://www.recreatingtampa.com/

Thanks fans! I've just set up a Facebook Fan page for Re/Creating Tampa that allows links to posts from the blog to be channeled into your Facebook feed.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/recreating-tampa/95687076074?ref=ts

Networked Blogs takes the RSS feed from R/CT and feeds it into the Fan Page. Fans get links from the R/CT feed funneled into their Facebook homepage news feed.

If you'd like to get links to R/CT posts channeled directly into your Facebook, pop on over & become a fan.

Thanks!

Thanks Creative Loafing for listing Re/Creating Tampa as a top local news site!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Thanks for being a fan of Re/Creating Tampa.

The Eating Tampa 2008 Best of poll has been posted.

It's voting time! What do you think is the best food in Tampa?

http://www.recreatingtampa.com/eatingtampa/2008/09/02/eating-tampas-2008-search-for-the-best-food-in-tampa/

Thanks to everyone who signed up as a fan/reader of Re/Creating Tampa!

Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see on any of the re/creating pages.

Thanks, Jeff.

I wonder if a pencil or a refillable pen is more green?

Thinking about pens and pencils reminds me of this story (I don't know if it's true or not).

Back when there was still a Soviet Union, NASA scientists and Soviet space scientists were gathered at a meeting in Europe. One NASA guy is explaining to his Soviet peer the problems they went through trying to create a pen that would write in zero-gravity, and how much money it eventually cost to do something so simple. "How did you guys resolve that problem?" he asked his Soviet counterpart.

"We used pencils."

I was in a meeting with city staff the other day when an architect explained to us the countless disposable pens and pencils that fill landfills. His firm buys from a company that makes pens from recycled material. Once empty, you throw them in a box and send them back and they will refill them, for a price, and mail them back.

I sadly stared at my own mechanical pencil that I refill myself with 0.7 mm soft leads and felt very ungreen. Ditto for refillable ink pens.

It confounds me that our culture must have something "new" to be green. Many times the green solution has always been there but we've chosen the more expensive (and typically more wasteful) solution out of convenience and stylistic reasons.

There I wrote something.