committing because i want help
removal of code that is no longer used
seeding the database if seed doesn't exist

FIXME: failing to query the db for said data
success! see below for more info

race condition between flask's debugger and the global session in
sessionmaker, but this can get gotten around by not using flask's
debugger

However, this isn't ideal for development, and this can be gotten around
with scoped sessions:
http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_9/orm/session.html?highlight=scoped_session

I will try this next before moving onto flask-sqlalchemy
creating scoped sessions to avoid race conditions
scoped sessions preventing race condition