I have a mission for the rest of this year now. Today, I broke my half-marathon personal best (set last October) by running the 13.1 miles in 2 hours 5 minutes 38 seconds. I managed this even though I struggled mightily the last two miles. So, now my mission is to break 2 hours.

BTW, it was an absolutely gorgeous day in Hyannis. The route goes by yacht harbors and other beautiful parts of the Cape Cod coast. Brilliant.

That was the way it looked on Wed (2/20). As of yesterday, the entire roof is framed.

We’re expecting that we’ll be moving in some time in the fall of this year. Yikes! This means deciding what to do with our condo in Cambridge prontissimo. Should we sell, should we rent it out? And in either case, there’s plenty of fixing up to do.

This morning, I took Emma to a soccer refereeing course in Westborough. After dropping her off, I drove to Berlin and did 3 turns on a 3 mile loop around our future home. Notice how it says “Sawyer HILL”? To which I have this to say: NO SHIT! This was supposed to be an easy slow-paced nine mile run. Instead, it was a serious hill workout. Once we actually live there, I expect to quickly be in awesome shape because of all the hill running.

The site was buzzing with construction activity even at 8am on a Saturday morning. The beeping of heavy equipment backing up can be heard for miles. Our closest neighbors must be getting batty.

And yes, this means I am in training again: weather and flu permitting, I will be running the Hyannis Half-Marathon in two weeks.

The experience far exceeded my expectations. It was a lot of fun to run the course along Boston’s riverway parkland, up into the Franklin Park Zoo (hi to the giraffes), and back. Running with 3,600 people sure does make a big difference compared to solitary runs along the Charles River. I ran at a speed that I truly did not know I could sustain for such a long time. I finished the run in 2:08:34 for a pace of 9:49 minutes per mile, placing in 2,670th place.

[The professionals, who we at the back of the pack got to see whizzing past on their way back to the finish when we were still on our way out to the half way point, ran about twice as fast.]

This was so much fun and so satisfying that I’m surely going to do it again.

As it turned out, it was exceedingly difficult to find an appropriate site for our neighborhood in the western suburbs, close enough to SVS for a reasonable commute. The zoning laws of the towns out here are designed for large houses on large plots and generally do not allow the kind of clustered neighborhood we were planning to build. We went through many possible sites, several times we thought we had found the right spot, only to be thwarted by technical problems with the site or NIMBY opposition from abutters. In the mean time, our group evolved to include families with other educational philosophies, singles, and older couples whose kids had flown the coop.

Two years ago, we were approached by another cohousing group, Camelot Cohousing, who in turn had been approached by the conservation agency The Sudbury Valley Trustees, who in turn had been approached by the Selectmen of the Town of Berlin, MA. There was a large parcel that used be a tree nursery that was coming up for sale. The town had the right of first refusal on the parcel and did not want a typical subdivision that would turn all that very attractive land into asphalt driveways and large houses. The Sudbury Valley Trustees convinced the selectmen that cohousing was a great solution. As part of the arrangement, the project would fall under the state’s 40B housing law, which would ensure that 25% of the units built would be “affordable” under state guidelines. The selectmen agreed to the plan. Camelot and Mosaic Commons would jointly develop the land, building two separate 34 unit cohousing neighborhoods, and preserving most of the parcel as conservation land.

But before the project could go forward, we would have to get a comprehensive permit from the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals. That process turned out to be much more adversarial and contentious than we had been led to expect. Abutters fiercely argued against our project and the board itself was very skeptical about the merits of our project (and frankly, of our “strange” lifestyle). After two years, however, in what for us is still a stunning turn of events, the ZBA granted us our comprehensive permit this past January and the appeals period just ran out without any appeals having been filed.

So, we are ready to finalize our designs, break ground this summer, and move in to our new homes in the fall of 2008.

There is the obligatory establishment curmudgeon, who says things like “it is not clear to me how they will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing and math” and somewhat scary-sounding things like “as school choice expands and home-schooling in general grows, this is one of those models that I think the larger public sphere needs to be aware of because the folks who are engaging in these radical forms of school are doing so legally. If the public and policy makers don’t feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly.” (The article does not challenge the presumption that the question of whether unschooling produces productive citizens should be addressed by consulting the feelings of the public and of policy makers, rather than checking in with reality: just find out whether unschooled children actually turn into effective adults — by which I don’t mean standardized testing, as hinted at in the article, but simply checking whether the adults that were unschooled as children now lead productive and enjoyable lives.)

The article does not draw the connection to free schools, such as Sudbury Valley (see also the Wikipedia article on SVS) which is where my children go to school. In my mind, such schools add to the unschooling idea the advantage of giving the children a space of their own (I am suspicious of the power structures involved in homeschooling) and a much more complex social environment than they face in their own home.

BTW, there is an Associated Press article on the Brooklyn Free School, which is being picked up by many news outlets around the nation, such as the MetroWest Daily News. Today, an abbreviated version appeared in the Boston Globe.

Note in particular the division of Connecticut and the small Red Sox enclaves across the border in New York state.