One of my best years in school…
50 minute read
June 21, 2024, 1:00 PM
Out of all of the school experiences that I’ve discussed in the past, I recently realized while I was out operating the train that I’ve never said a whole lot about sixth grade. That year is a tie with eighth grade for my best year in school, because for the most part, everything that year just worked out really well. It was a year where I learned a lot in new surroundings, and I had a lot of great new experiences.
Sixth grade came on the heels of my absolute worst year in school, i.e. fifth grade. I’ve written about that experience in some detail not once, but twice, but to put it simply, it was an extremely toxic environment where the school was actively working against us, and which we had determined would not get better no matter what we did. Additionally, sixth grade was still part of elementary school in Rogers at that time, so if we had remained, we would have been right back at the same toxic school environment for another year, which have been far less than ideal. I admit that I was a bit wary about wanting to deal with school again, but of course, it wasn’t like dropping out and doing something else was an option. I was absolutely delighted to learn that in my new school district, sixth grade was part of middle school, and not the final year of elementary school. By fifth grade, it was clear that I had outgrown the elementary school format, so moving up to the next tier made enough sense. I was ready to do something new, and I was up for the challenge. It was the perfect stage for a fantastic rebound year after the previous disaster of a year.
On the day that we arrived in Stuarts Draft, we took care of school matters for both my sister and me. She would be starting second grade at Stuarts Draft Elementary School, and I would be starting sixth grade at Stuarts Draft Middle School. And there was another twist: sixth grade orientation was that same night. We all were like, guess we know what we’re doing tonight.
Continue reading…Categories: Fire drills, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
Thinking about various church experiences…
22 minute read
March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM
Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school. It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?” My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around. In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later). But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were. Some experiences were quite good, while some them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.
For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003. I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it. My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion. Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989. Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light. I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack. Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic. When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age. Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.
Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked. As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time. By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more. We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.
Categories: Arkansas, Reddit, Religion, Stuarts Draft
A weekend in Augusta County, unsupervised…
28 minute read
December 22, 2023, 5:00 PM
I did my quarterly trip down to Augusta County on December 13-15, and this time, unlike most occasions when I do this trip, I was doing it completely unsupervised. Elyse was pet-sitting for a friend of ours, and so she was in Fort Washington while I went down to Virginia. With that in mind, I took full advantage of this situation, packing in all of the stuff that I would want to do that Elyse would probably not have the patience for. In other words, lots of drone photography, mostly photographing Augusta County school buildings, with the thought’s being that very few people would get good aerials of these relatively small schools. I had a good time, and I felt very productive.
I got out of the house around 11:00, and then hit the road. This was a trip where I went down via US 29 and back via I-81, and things immediately did not look good, as I encountered major traffic on the Beltway. That was annoying, but I recovered well enough, though I did start to contemplate how much of a difference it would have made to go an alternate route for a Charlottesville trajectory, with the thought’s being to 270 to 15 to 29, going via Point of Rocks and Leesburg, or something similar to that. After all, the alternate route works well when I’m going to I-81. That alternate route bypasses the Beltway and I-66, going to I-81 via US 340 and Route 7 via Harpers Ferry and Winchester, and only adds seven minutes to the trip. I ran my proposed alternate route for 29 through Google, and it adds about thirty minutes to the drive to go across Montgomery and Frederick counties via local roads, and then 15 at Point of Rocks, and joining 29 just south of Haymarket. This also bypasses the busiest part of my route on 29, in the Gainesville area. The question really becomes a matter of whether this alternate route is worth the additional time to travel it vs. dealing with the annoyances of the Beltway and 66, as well as the additional cost involved with taking the express lanes.
In any case, once I got to the express lanes on the Beltway, I took them, and continued in the express lanes on I-66, because I didn’t want to risk any more delays. I made a pit stop at the Sheetz in Haymarket, and then from there, I took 15 to 29 and then the rest was normal for a trip down via 29. The plan was to dip into Warrenton on the way down to photograph some converted restaurant buildings. I had spotted a few of these on past drives through Warrenton, and now I was going to do them, along with whatever else I found interesting on the way down. This was also why I hit up the Sheetz in Haymarket rather than the third Sheetz (Bealeton) like I normally would. Warrenton came before the third Sheetz, and I wanted some food inside of me before I got busy.
Categories: Augusta County, Charlottesville, Family, High school, Middle school, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Stuarts Draft, Travel, Waynesboro, Woomy
Playing with the AI image generator…
22 minute read
October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM
Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base. I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me. My first idea was to have it generate me. The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.
The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA
A fun weekend where no photography goals were met…
13 minute read
June 29, 2023, 8:44 AM
From June 21-23, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Virginia, but instead of centering on Staunton like we usually do, we centered on Roanoke (but don’t worry – we still saw my parents in Stuarts Draft). We had planned this trip largely as a photography outing, and then the weather didn’t cooperate. It was raining continuously almost the entire time, which made for a more difficult drive than I would have liked, but the trip was worth it. I guess that you could say that while we didn’t necessarily do much in the way as far as photography, we laid the groundwork for future trips by identifying potential subjects. I didn’t want to lay groundwork for the future this time around, as I really wanted to bring home the goods, but such is what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate. I brought my DSLR and my drone on this trip, but neither one of them ever left their respective carrier.
The plan was to drive down from the DC area to Lynchburg via US 29, spend the afternoon and early evening of the first day in Lynchburg, and then head over to Roanoke, where we were staying at the Hampton Inn located downtown (the one built on top of a city parking garage). Then we would spend the entire second day in Roanoke, largely with Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum that Elyse and I both serve on the board of. Then on the last day, we would head up to Staunton and Waynesboro, where I had some things that I wanted to get over there, before going over to see my parents. What ended up happening was pretty similar to plan, but not quite. Our departure was delayed, because we already knew that much of the day would be a rainout. The drive down to Charlottesville was fine, making one stop for food at the third (Bealeton) Sheetz. We made a brief stop at Barracks Road in Charlottesville, and then we were back on the road. It started raining harder once we cleared Charlottesville, and we saw three different accidents between Charlottesville and Amherst where people had clearly wiped out after driving faster than conditions allowed. One of those accidents was a police car, which was clearly totaled in its accident. We took it slowly, especially since I didn’t have that much experience taking the new HR-V in driving rain like this before, plus I wasn’t as familiar with the stretch of 29 from Charlottesville to Lynchburg (particularly from I-64 to VA 151) as I am with 29 north of Charlottesville.
Categories: Friends, Honda HR-V (2023), Lynchburg, Roanoke, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Transit, Travel
Making a weekend trip out of a delivery…
15 minute read
April 7, 2023, 10:00 AM
Recently, I was finally able to complete the last little bits of business related to the car accident from last October, and put it all behind me. On Thursday, March 30, I made the 175-mile journey to Stuarts Draft in the Scion – a trip that would leave it back home with my parents, where it belongs. And while I was at it, I made a weekend trip out of it, coupling it with a day in Richmond, where I did some photography. As such, I would traverse what I like to call Virginia’s “Interstate square”. If you look at a map of Virginia, the various Interstate highways in the state form something like a lopsided square, consisting of I-66 to the north, I-81 to the west, I-64 to the south, and I-95 to the east, and Strasburg, the DC area, Richmond, and Staunton at the corners:
Categories: Driving, Family, Harrisonburg, Howard Johnson's, JMU, Photography, Richmond, Roads, Scion xB, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Travel
A little adventure in Virginia, mostly in the woods…
26 minute read
October 6, 2022, 8:06 AM
From September 13-15, Elyse and I had a little weekend adventure in Virginia, where we went down to Augusta County stayed in Staunton like we usually do. This one was a little different than most because it was partly a solo adventure. Prior to this trip, Elyse had been down in Roanoke attending to business related to a nonprofit that she volunteers with, so she traveled up from there on Amtrak, and we met up in Charlottesville. My original plan was to go the easterly route down, taking I-95 to Fredericksburg and then taking Route 3, Route 20, US 15, and a few other routes that would take me through Locust Grove, Orange, and Gordonsville. However, at the last minute, I had a change of heart, deciding that (A) I didn’t feel like wading through traffic on the Beltway or 95, (B) that easterly track would get me to Charlottesville far too early, meaning that I would have to kill time before Elyse would arrive, and (C) I had ideas that necessitated taking other routes. So I took the westernmost route, which primarily utilizes I-81, and took the “alternate” version of that, which goes through Harpers Ferry and Charles Town in West Virginia via US 340, and then taking Route 7 to meet I-81 in Winchester. Yes, I’m going north to head south, but the distance and time for going out to Harpers Ferry is almost the same as it is to go through Northern Virginia on I-66, so it works.
My first point of interest was a relatively obscure sign in the middle of a field in Verona:
Image: Google Street View
Categories: Afton Mountain, Augusta County, Blue Ridge Parkway, Charlottesville, Nature, Recreation/Exercise, Some people, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Stuarts Draft, Travel, Vintage business, Waynesboro
Thirty years ago, we arrived…
18 minute read
September 5, 2022, 6:10 PM
August 31, 2022 marked 30 years from the day that my family came to Virginia, after having lived in Arkansas for the previous seven and a half years. Thirty years is a little less than three quarters of my life thus far. It just seems so weird to think about it that way. But it really does mark the beginning of an era in my life, because unlike more recent moves, the move from Arkansas to Virginia was a clean separation, leaving a lot of elements of my life behind and starting new in Virginia, especially in those pre-Internet days, when there was no social media to keep in contact with everyone. Additionally, having no family out there, I have not been back since we left. The moves since then were not quite as clean of a break as the move from Arkansas was. My 2007 move to Maryland was only me, and my parents stayed where they were. Plus, as it’s only a few hours away, I can go down there almost any time I want, including down and back in the same day. Then my 2017 move was local, so nothing else changed in my life other than the location of my house, and my commute to work. I just upgraded my living situation, and that was it.
The move to Virginia was the culmination of something that was a long time coming. My parents never really wanted to live in Arkansas to begin with, but it was a good career move for Dad with Scott Nonwovens, so they begrudgingly did it, and so we left New Jersey for Arkansas in February 1985. I remember Mom’s mentioning a number of times early on about wanting to move back to New Jersey. And in all fairness, that was understandable. Dad had something to do in Rogers, as he was the one with the job. Mom didn’t know anyone, and her primary role at that time was to take care of a newborn and a preschooler. She had left everyone she knew when we left New Jersey, and it took a while to meet people and form new relationships, though that improved once Mom got a job at the Walton Life Fitness Center in Bentonville. We also didn’t get along with our next door neighbors on one side, as their kids were out of control. That ultimately led to something of a falling out. We put slats in our existing fence on that side so that we wouldn’t have to see them when we were in the backyard, and they built an entirely new spite fence on their side so that they wouldn’t have to see us. The neighbors on the other side were a retired couple, and they were awesome.
Meanwhile, the education situation in Rogers had really come to a head. I had just completed fifth grade, which was my worst year from kindergarten through high school, without question, and that had followed third and fourth grade years that were pretty rough as well. My parents had gone about as far as they could with the school system, and no one was looking forward to another year at Bonnie Grimes Elementary. I was also hearing all kinds of rumblings at the time from my parents about changes afoot. One was that we would not be returning to Grimes Elementary again, and I was also hearing things about moving, which made me think that something big and life-changing was coming, but nothing concrete as of yet. It had been rumored that Scott had wanted to transfer my father to their corporate office in Philadelphia, and so it seemed like we would probably be moving back to New Jersey, as Mom had wanted all along. I didn’t want to move, because unlike my parents, Rogers was pretty much all that I knew, and I was used to it.
Categories: Arkansas, Childhood, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
Flying over the Shenandoah Valley with a drone…
10 minute read
October 25, 2020, 10:45 PM
Elyse and I recently made a trip down to Augusta County to see my parents, and we both photographed a bunch of stuff with my drone while we were down there. So all in all, we had a pretty productive time. I have gotten pretty proficient in flying my drone around things, and I’ve gotten some nice photos. The goal of the drone photography this time was to duplicate a lot of what I did in my earlier entry about the area in Microsoft Flight Simulator, but in real life. All in all, I had a good time, and I liked the results, as I flew around Staunton, Waynesboro, Afton Mountain, and Stuarts Draft.
In Staunton, I first got aerials of the old DeJarnette Center, which is an abandoned children’s mental hospital that closed around 1996 in favor of a newer, more modern facility nearby. If this place sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve photographed it before. So here it is:
Categories: Afton Mountain, CFW, Family, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Woomy
Flying over the Shenandoah Valley…
8 minute read
August 27, 2020, 11:25 PM
Recently, Elyse got a copy of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator game, which, among other things, features real landscapes based on map data. However, it’s not without its issues, since, if it doesn’t have good data for buildings and such, it attempts to fill in the gaps by rendering a building, taking a guess as to what kind of building it’s supposed to be. When there is good building data, the buildings look correct, as is the case in much of Howard County, Maryland. Down in Augusta County, that’s not the case, and most of the buildings are rendered by the game, doing its darndest to make a good guess. To accomplish this evening’s field trip, Elyse dropped us at Eagle’s Nest Airport, which is a privately-owned airport just outside Waynesboro. I didn’t have to fly the plane. Rather, we left the plane on the runway, and just flew around with the camera. I didn’t want to have to fly an airplane, after all. I just wanted to have a little eye in the sky. So from Eagle’s Nest, I quickly got my bearings, and made a beeline to Stuarts Draft.
First thing that I took a look at was my old middle school, Stuarts Draft Middle School:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Video games, Waynesboro
A Facebook comment should not bother me this much…
5 minute read
February 11, 2020, 11:11 AM
Recently, I commented on a post on the Facebook page for WHSV, the local ABC affiliate for Harrisonburg, Virginia, and got some unusual feedback. The original post was for an article about Trump’s participation in the “March for Life“, an anti-choice demonstration held annually in DC on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.
Before I continue, though, it seems worthwhile to explain my stance on the matter of abortion. My stance is that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. But ultimately, it’s not my call. What other people do with their bodies is their business, and it doesn’t affect me.
I also believe that abortion is more or less a settled matter, but that it has value for the GOP as a campaign issue. In other words, the Republican Party will talk a big game about it, but ultimately, no one is going to ban abortion. Ever. Why ban it and settle the matter decisively in your favor, when you can bring it up as a campaign issue every election cycle and raise money and get people to vote based on it? To actually ban abortion would be to kill the golden goose, and also hand a massive fundraising opportunity to the Democrats. Maybe I’m a bit cynical about the whole thing, but I imagine that if they were really going to act on that issue, they would have done it by now, during the various periods where the GOP has controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. That they haven’t done that tells me that they are not interested in settling it.
Categories: Middle school, National politics, Social media, Stuarts Draft
They couldn’t even get mad…
3 minute read
August 12, 2019, 10:17 AM
After the Journal entry where I spoke about my seventh grade year, which generated a lot of great discussion, mostly on Facebook, I thought I’d share an amusing moment from eighth grade.
Eighth grade was one of my best years in school. I had a great group of teachers, and I had a much easier time with the kids. Sure, some kids were still terrible, but not like seventh grade. I didn’t get in trouble at all in eighth grade, except for one time in the middle of the second semester, when I got written up for something relatively minor, but which was entirely my fault.
To give some background, my mother has always enjoyed sharing information that she learns with me. In the era of the Internet, I typically use it as a starting point to do my own research to turn up more information about it, but back then, with much more limited resources, I typically took it at face value, and was still happy to have learned something new, even if I couldn’t necessarily dive into it more deeply. In this particular instance, what Mom shared was that men who wore boxer shorts had higher sperm counts than men who wore briefs. Okay. So 13-year-old me just learned an interesting new factoid, though I didn’t really understand the whole mechanism behind it (if you want to know, go look it up for yourself). But in any case, I was a tad more knowledgeable than I was five minutes earlier, and that was awesome.
Categories: Family, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
In hindsight, sometimes I wonder if I might have had an easier time…
12 minute read
July 14, 2019, 12:20 PM
Sometimes I wonder if, in hindsight, I might have had an easier time in school if I had just beaten the crap out of a few kids. Seriously. I got picked on quite a bit, particularly in middle school. I got made fun of for my weight, I got made fun of for the way I walked (which I found out much later was due to overly tight calf muscles, which is remedied through stretching), and I got made fun of for my mannerisms.
I admit that I was a bit of an easy mark in middle school. I wouldn’t fight back, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was in a martial arts class at the time that emphasized never starting a fight. Additionally, and more importantly, when students get into a fight in school, fault was typically assigned equally regardless of what happened, and so both students got suspended. Thus even if you were not the one who initiated the fight and you were trying to get the other kid off of you, you were still getting suspended. Since my parents had decided before I was born that I was going to college, getting suspended was viewed as the worst thing ever. Recall the “you might as well wish you were dead” remark from when I got suspended in fourth grade. We later found out after we moved to Virginia that the elementary school suspension wasn’t in my records. Whether that was sloppy work on Mrs. Carmical’s part or what have you, I don’t know, but officially, it never happened. However, getting suspended going forward was a no-go, because of the assumption that it would affect my ability to get into college. As it turns out, that assumption was mistaken, because no college cares about what you did in middle school. But for that mistaken assumption, I had a rough time.
In reading various discussions online, one thing that I saw over and over was that when the victims of bullying retaliated against their attackers, it generally put an end to it. One story from online that stuck with me was where a girl who was being bullied walked by and jabbed a pair of scissors into her attacker’s back. She got in some trouble, but the end result was that her bully now feared her. Seemed like a good result. She ended it. And in a fight, if everyone is getting suspended, it really changes the dynamic of things. With nothing to lose, why not inflict maximum damage? Give the kid something to remember you by. Bet that they won’t mess with you again after that.
Categories: Middle school, Stuarts Draft
Renting out eight rooms…
5 minute read
September 30, 2017, 12:29 AM
So apparently, I spoke too soon when it came to the closure of The Inn at Afton. You may recall that last month, I announced the closure of The Inn at Afton, based on a sign that said that the lobby and hotel were closed. Elyse and I went down that way again on Wednesday, and one of our stops was to see how The Inn at Afton looked in the daylight after finally going out of business for good. Much to our surprise, we found that the place was open again. We stopped into room 211, which was being used as the lobby, and had a chat with the lady working inside. As it turns out, the hotel is barely operational, with only eight rooms, all on the parking lot side, in service. None of the rooms on the other side, which has a tremendous view of the piedmont, are in service. I’m told that the remaining rooms have been stripped, and a walk past some of the first-floor rooms that are not in service seems to confirm this. That means that out of 118 total rooms, 110 of them are out of service, presumably for being uninhabitable. That’s an availability of 6.7%. For that few rooms, it hardly seems worthwhile to remain open, but apparently, they do, likely out of habit.
Meanwhile, the room being used as the lobby smelled strongly of mold, and had visible mold and water damage. Definitely an unhealthy environment. We might have stuck around for longer and chatted with the very nice lady working there, but the mold smell was too much. I imagine that the rooms that are still in service are just as bad, if they are willing to let the room that they’re using as a lobby become so bad. Thank heavens for Orbit “Bubblemint” gum. It got the mold taste out of my mouth.
So apparently, and much to my surprise, just when we thought that the book had closed on the operational history of the vintage businesses on Afton Mountain, there’s more to the Afton story to be told.
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Friends, Railroads, Stuarts Draft, Vintage business, Walmart, Waynesboro
Just when you thought that the mountain couldn’t look any worse than it already did…
7 minute read
April 16, 2017, 5:37 PM
On Tuesday, April 11, I got together with Elyse and Melissa, and we headed down to Virginia for the day. The plan was to get together with my parents, plus visit Afton Mountain and downtown Staunton.
We left the house at 9:30, and took US 29 down to Charlottesville. First stop was Moe’s Original Bar B Que, where we had lunch with my father. Fun time, and my father seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to finding good barbecue. Every barbecue place that Dad has taken me to has been wonderful, and this was no exception.
From here, we took US 250 across to Afton Mountain. There, we went to the second overlook, i.e. the Rockfish Valley Parking Overlook, to get some views. I tend to avoid Afton Overlook, the first overlook, after being propositioned for sex there one night back in 2005. The second overlook, which is a mile and some change further down the road, tends to attract fewer undesirables. I suppose it’s because it’s further away from civilization than the first one, which is a minute’s drive from the freeway. In any case, the view is awesome:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Family, Melissa, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Urban exploration, Waynesboro