A lesson on how not to behave when doing advocacy work…
9 minute read
April 27, 2021, 12:55 AM
Lately, there has been a small grassroots movement in Montgomery Village called “Citizens for Airpark Safety” complaining about noise from the Montgomery County Airpark (GAI/KGAI), which is a small public-use general aviation airport located in the Gaithersburg area. I had heard rumblings about this from a few folks on a local Montgomery Village group that Elyse and I are in, but then it recently made its way to the physical space on Sunday when I found this on my front door as I was leaving for work:
Continue reading…Categories: Activism, Elyse, Montgomery Village
Peep show…
6 minute read
April 15, 2021, 11:41 AM
No, not like that. Get your mind out of the gutter.
On Monday, April 5, Elyse and I went up to Westminster, where we saw the annual Peep show, held in the former Sears store at TownMall of Westminster. There, we saw a number of displays made out of Peeps, those marshmallow rabbit and duck-shaped candies that some people like to eat around Easter. All in all, it was pretty fun, though I admit that the ones that incorporated the pandemic into their theming made me cringe a little bit, because I am so over that (admittedly, though, I was over it from the moment that it started).
In any case, here are some of the highlights from the visit.
Bunny peep made out of bunny peeps.
Categories: Events, Holidays, Westminster
No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose…
21 minute read
April 6, 2021, 1:30 PM
You probably didn’t realize it, but for the first half of 2020, Elyse and I hosted a now-former friend of ours, her boyfriend, and her infant child in the house. That was a situation that we would have never touched with a ten-foot pole if we had known how it would ultimately turn out. What was supposed to have been a two-month stay for one adult and an infant ended up being a six-month stay for two adults and an infant, and ended up with a destroyed friendship, a lot of hurt feelings, and resentment all around.
The story starts out in the middle of 2019, when our friend started a long-distance relationship with a guy that she had gone to high school with. He was now serving in the army, and stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. In a very short time, that relationship turned into an engagement. Elyse and I both agreed that relationship had progressed very rapidly – much faster than either one of us would have ever been comfortable with if it were happening to us. Then in September, when we were planning an outing together, we learned that our friend was pregnant, and also, that she was no longer seeing the person with whom she had been engaged, who was also the father of her then-unborn child. As I was told, the fiancé had cheated on her, and so she broke off the engagement. By the time that we actually got together again, she had gotten a new boyfriend, and he would be joining us on this adventure. I was fine with this, because I usually got along with this friend’s friends, and this seemed to be no exception, as the guy seemed nice enough. In December, Elyse and I were invited to our friend’s baby shower. We went, we brought gifts, and generally had a good time. The one awkward moment at the whole baby shower was seeing the interaction between the boyfriend and her father. My friend’s father made a big deal about refusing to shake the boyfriend’s hand, and the boyfriend was clearly not amused by that gesture. I was a bit uncomfortable just witnessing it. I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, as the boyfriend had given me no reason for me to suspect anything in our previous meeting, plus the boyfriend was not the one who got her pregnant and subsequently cheated on her. So I just chalked it up to a “no one is good enough for my little girl” attitude on her father’s part.