In other news of interest:
1. The Indianapolis Parks Department is conducting a series of meetings to discuss with the public the 2009 update to the Indianapolis Department of Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Plan and Greenways Master Plan. The Round 1 series of meetings is to discuss the planning process and gather public feed back. The meeting scheduled for the Pike Township locale will be held Tuesday, March 4, 2008, from 6:30 to 8 PM, at the Pike Freshman Center Conference Room, 6801 Zionsville Road. The attached pdf document is a flier distributed by the Parks Department and lists all meeting dates throughout the city-county.

2. As of the week of February 11th, the Indianapolis IndyGo bus system has begun operating some new and expanded routes in its service area. There is now an expanded route that comes from downtown Indianapolis north to the Traders Point Shopping Center and also services Park 100. This route may be useful for numerous occasions, including having a car undergoing service or to attend a Colts game or other downtown activity and avoiding paying for parking.
Check out the new route schedules at www.indygo.net/routes.htm.
Route 37 – Park 100: Extends service to Traders Point Center (W. 86th St.) and Intech Park (W. 71st St.). Operates Monday through Sunday. The Customer Service Center, located in the Indianapolis City Market, also has schedules. For more information, call the center at 635-3344.

3. For those of you (like most of us) who get confused by the terms and various steps undertaken to develop an historic district, such as we are underway to do with the Traders Point Rural Historic District, the January-February 2008 edition of the “Indiana Preservationist” magazine, published by the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, has a very helpful group of articles as the edition’s Feature Topic, entitled “Tools of the Trade”. You can find the magazine and these articles at: http://www.historiclandmarks.org/Resources/Publications/IndianaPreservationist/PreservationistArchive/Pages/PreservationistArchive2008.aspx

4. Do you have concerns about cosmetics and personal hygiene products? You may be interested in the following information:
Chemicals in Cosmetics and Personal Care Products.
The Environmental Working Group has developed Skin Deep, a database that pairs ingredients in more than 25,000 personal care products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases and generates a score based on the toxicity of those ingredients. It is easy to search by individual products and can also produce lists of products in different categories by score. www.cosmeticdatabase.com/ You can also check out www.safecosmetics.org/ for more information about the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of women’s, public health, labor, environmental health and consumer-rights groups whose goal is to protect the health of consumers and workers by requiring the health and beauty industry to phase out the use of chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects and other health problems, and replace them with safer alternatives.