That's Harper doing his thing at a nearby street corner.

If you have a disability and want to bring your helper parrot, monkey or snake with you in public, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. starting today, March 15, 2011, only service dogs and trained miniature horses are protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. These ADA revisions were drawn up after some disability advocates asked the Department of Justice to crack down on people who were faking or exaggerating disabilities in order to get their companion animals into places of public accommodation. I wrote a post for today’s Bark Blog about all this – here’s an excerpt:

It really does make it harder for the rest of us when an animal or his handler’s poor behavior causes people to think badly about service animals. I’ve heard stories about helper parrots pecking at shoppers in stores, a therapeutic rat that quelled anxiety in his owner but caused anxiety to others, and comfort pigs going crazy on airplanes. In my own life, however, the only negative service animal stories that have affected me personally have been about…dogs.

The last time I went to a Cubs game I was stopped while trying to get into Wrigley Field with my Seeing Eye dog. The man taking tickets said he didn’t know if the dog was allowed. I pointed to the harness, told him she was a Seeing Eye dog. He was skeptical.

Turns out that a week earlier someone had brought their puppy to Wrigley, claiming the dog was a service dog. The dog misbehaved, and fans sitting nearby complained. After that, the people working the gates were told to scrutinize anyone coming in with a service dog.

Faking a disability to gain privilege is fraud. It also results in increased scrutiny of people with legitimate disabilities. You can link to the Bark Blog to read my guest post in its entirety. Bonus: there’s an awfully cute photo of Harper and me there, too – it was taken when we were just getting to know each other at the Seeing Eye.

That's Nigel, my co-worker.

After hearing about the earthquakes in Japan yesterday, this story is particularly poignant. One of my co-workers at Easter Seals Headquarters is from New Zealand. Wellington, to be exact. Earlier this week Nigel (don’t you think that’s a great name? I do!) sent me a story he saw in a New Zealand paper about a guide dog named Kiwi. The eight-year-old Labrador/Retriever cross led his blind companion Blair McConnell safely out of an office building after last month’s earthquake in Christchurch. Kiwi stayed on task until a stranger gave the shaken pair a ride home. The story was heartwarming, of course, but what I found particularly interesting was this part of the article :

Kiwi’s bravery is already the stuff of urban legend. The story goes that the dog guided his master on foot across town to his home,
which has left McConnell feeling “a bit of a fraud”, knowing he got a ride, but: “I’m quite sure he would have walked me home that day if he had needed to.” 

This is the kind of quirky thing editors at Bark magazine just love. I contacted the blog moderator there to see if she might want me to write a guest post about Kiwi, and she said, “Sure!”

What? You call yourself a dog lover, and you’ve never heard of The Bark?! Here’s a description of the four-color glossy magazine from their web site:

Taking the magazine’s slogan to heart—Dog Is My Co-Pilot—Bark became the first magazine to tap into the exploding phenomena of dog culture and lifestyle, focusing on the growing bond between individuals and their pet companions. Bark’s impeccable pedigree includes publishing many of today’s most acclaimed authors, including Ann Patchett, Augusten Burroughs, Rick Bass, Amy Hempel, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver. 

I’ve published a few articles for The Bark, too, and it’s always a thrill to say I write for the same magazine Ann Patchett writes for! You can read my guest blog about Kiwi at The Bark’s site and link to other Bark stories there, too—if you like dogs, trust me, you’ll like The Bark.

I have a part-time job at Easter Seals Headquarters, moderating the Easter Seals and autism blog. Five years ago my then-boss told everyone in the Interactive Marketing Department that we had to open an account on Facebook. I thought this was creepy. I like my job, though, so in a civil-disobedience-type move, I went ahead and opened an account. In my dog’s name. Hanni handed her Facebook account over to Harper when she retired.

This guy look familiar? He’s Harper’s bro!

My job at Easter Seals has taught me a lot about social media. I’m on Twitter. I’m LinkedIn. I even have an account on Good Reads. And when my nephew Brian offered to set up a Beth Finke Fan Page on Facebook for me? I said “Sure!” It’s one thing to have all these accounts, though, and another thing to actually use them. That’s why I decided to hire Eliza Cooper.

I met Eliza when I was training with Harper at the Seeing Eye. She plays the drums, she’s an avid reader, and…a social media consultant. I liked Eliza the minute I met her, and when we discovered her dog is Harper’s brother, we knew it was destiny. We were meant to work together! And so, I am very pleased to introduce my social media consultant, Eliza Cooper, as a guest blogger today.

Dropping by to introduce myself

by Eliza Cooper

Hi there. I’m Eliza, and I wanted to drop by to introduce myself. I had the pleasure of meeting Beth in late November when she was in training with her new dog Harper at The Seeing Eye. I was also there to receive a new dog (my second), and happened to be matched with Harper’s brother. They’re both high-energy, fun-loving boys — great for city life, and my dog and I are busy taking New York by storm.

Beth and I got to talking about Facebook and Twitter one day during class, and when she found out that I am a social media consultant by trade, she expressed interest in learning more.

What is a social media consultant, you might ask? I seek to empower people, businesses and brands through social media, meaning that I give advice to clients on how to promote their business via tweets, Facebook fan pages, blog posts, and any other social media platform that might be relevant to them. The social media realm is full of opportunities to engage with peers and consumers, and more and more companies are realizing this. It turns out that customers become more devoted to a brand when it has an online personality, and when the employees behind that personality care to listen to ideas — and complaints – from customers. The challenge for companies is to figure out how to reach those consumers who will engage with them online. I help them surmount that challenge.

Anyway, for the next few months, I’ll be giving Beth some ideas on new ways to build her online presence, and I hope you’ll stay tuned to Beth’s Twitter feed and Facebook fan page.

If you’d like to find out more about me and what I do, please visit my blog, and follow me on Twitter. Thanks! We look forward to your input.

One night when Mike and I were still living in Urbana, we sprung for a babysitter and headed to a nearby bar to hear some live music. The band was fun, the place was packed, and two young strangers invited us to share their table.

That's a just-completed residence built to the Passive House standard, in Salem, Ore.

Through the din of the band and the beer we managed to make conversation and discover that the two of them were newlyweds, both working as architects in Chicago. Katrin was born in Germany. Nic was born near Urbana. They were in town that weekend looking for an inexpensive empty lot where they could build something called a Passive House. I couldn’t make out Nic’s explanation of what a Passive House was, exactly, but before the night ended, Katrin had slipped a business card to Mike, and we promised we’d let them know if we heard of any property for sale.

The next time we saw Katrin, she was a widow. Nic had an undiagnosed brain tumor. He died suddenly. Unexpectedly. Katrin

That's Katrin Klingenberg.

left Chicago and moved to Urbana alone, determined to build a Passive House in Nic’s memory.

The Passive House concept began in Germany and represents today’s most stringent — most aggressive, you might say  — building energy standard. Buildings are constructed or retrofitted to cut the standard slash heating/cooling energy consumption by a whopping 90%. Windows usually face the southern sun, but the Passive House goes a lot further. Passive House construction uses thick walls and super-insulation —  a wall of a Passive House is about three times as thick as a typical  building. The buildings are super-tight; they use tape-sealed construction to keep cold out, and heat in, during the winter. Vice-versa during the summer. That means air doesn’t leak in or out through cracks and holes. But the air quality is still fine — there is a constant, low level ventilator operating. And it uses a heat exchanger so that exhaust air (already heated) transfers heat energy to the incoming air. Mike told me that some homes are heated with the equivalent of a blow dryer. Most don’t need a conventional furnace — or cooling system. Katrin told me that if Americans started using the Passive House design it would help energy conservation in the United States, her new home.

Twenty-five thousand certified passive structures — from schools and commercial buildings to homes and apartment houses — have been built in Europe. Katrin Klingenberg’s Smith House, completed in Urbana in 2002, was the very first Passive House built in the United States. Her determination to get the Passive House standard, literally, off the ground in America did not end with the completion of the Smith House. Local builder Mike Kernagis pitched in on other Passive House projects in Urbana, and in 2007, he and Katrin founded a non-profit called Passive House Institute US (PHIUS). They asked my Mike to sit on the board, and he’s been involved ever since. Since the completion of Smith House, more Passive House structures have been built in the United States, with more in the works. From a story in last September’s New York Times:

Ms. Klingenberg echoes many building science experts when she calls for more rigorous standards for energy-efficiency benchmarks, particularly if there is to be any hope of tackling the environmental and climate problems related to the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels. “We have to stop using halfway measures,” she says. “Each new building that we don’t go all the way with now is putting us deeper in the hole.” Ms. Klingenberg was a co-founder of the institute in 2008, intending it as a domestic outlet for the design philosophy espoused for the last 14 years by the passive-house movement’s official sanctioning body, the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt, Germany.

To date, Passive House Institute-U.S. has educated about 160 builders, architects and engineers in the standard through a series of training programs and a final certification exam. By year-end, the number is expected to be 300, and Ms. Klingenberg said the institute was having difficulty meeting demand for its courses.

The PHIUS board is meeting in Chicago this weekend, and of course Mike will be attending. Not as a board member, though — as an employee! PHIUS needed someone else on staff to help meet the growing demand for information on the Passive House energy standard, and in January they hired Mike as Director of Marketing and Outreach. Learn more about Passive House Institute U.S. in a February article in USA Today and in another recent article in the Chicago Tribune.

If you like what you read, check out the PHIUS Web site or the PHIUS Facebook page.

Flo’s voice rang out from the phone early yesterday morning. “Your friend Jenny Fischer’s picture is on the front page of the Tribune! It’s a really big picture, too!” The photo in the Chicago Tribune accompanied a story about the success of some independent bookstores, and it opened describing the store where my longtime friend Jenny works: The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn, Ill.

The store is one of about 50 independent retail booksellers in the Chicago area. Not too long ago, all of them and the other roughly 4,000 independents across the U.S. were supposed to vaporize. By some estimates, more than 2,000 did.

But about 1,500 survived. And through a mix of obsessive attention to detail, lean inventory, an embrace of technology and resourceful salesmanship, they hang in there.

The photo shows Jenny helping a customer with a book selection, something she has enjoyed doing for years. Long before she even started at The Bookstore, I always knew to go to Jenny for a book recommendation. We met when I was 13 years old. I tagged along with a friend to a slumber party at Jenny’s. She was Jenny Foucre than, and I’ll never forget walking into their house. Her father was a handsome man with an exotic first name: Jacques. Her mother, Suzanne, was a stand-out blonde. I was mesmerized. Books were everywhere. The shelves went from floor to ceiling, packed with so many titles that the books spilled out onto end tables and countertops. “My mom loves to read,” Jenny shrugged.

As years went by I got to know Jenny’s mother and father and all the other colorful members of her family. I became especially close to Jenny’s sister Jill. The two of them stuck with me when I lost my sight. They took a 150-mile drive with their kids to visit after Gus was born – they were worried about me, and with good reason. Over the years they’ve invited me to parties, welcomed me at their kitchen tables for late night talks, and best of all: they’ve always treated me the same way they did before I lost my sight. Our children are all grown now, and when we meet these days we share a bottle of wine, catch up and talk…about books.

That's Jenny with Hanni and me at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.

The Tribune article quoted some expert saying bookstores are still the most powerful way to connect a reader with a book. He also predicted that the independent bookstores that have survived the recession will continue to thrive. From the story:

That’s pretty much how Shannon Stevens perceived it one afternoon this week at The Bookstore. She and her daughter, Katherine, 4, were hanging out waiting for Dad to arrive on the train from work.

“They’ve survived because they’re responsive to their customers and the staff knows their books,” Stevens said.

Jenny arranged a book signing at The Bookstore when my memoir, Long Time, No See came out. The line was out the door. Her review of my memoir for Book Sense helped put Long Time, No See on the map. She has lugged books to countless events in Chicago and the suburbs for me to sell and sign. She drove me to Springfield to the Illinois Library Association conference when Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound debuted. She flew with me to New York City and guided me through the 2007 Book Expo at Javits.

Jenny and her sister Jill have been wonderful friends to me over the years, and I have their parents Suzanne and Jacques to thank for that. Suzanne died unexpectedly in 2009. We all miss her, but her spirit lives on through her daughters — and through their love of books. These days when people ask me if my friend Jenny still works at that little independent bookstore in Glen Ellyn, I just shrug my shoulders and say of course she does. “Jenny loves to read.”