Some sad looking retail…
6 minute read
August 9, 2020, 11:44 AM
On Saturday, Elyse, Aaron and Evan Stone, and I went out and visited the Kmart store in Aspen Hill, and the Sears store in White Oak. The last time that I had been to either of these stores was in 2017, well before the Sears bankruptcy. I had heard on social media about the way that the remaining non-closing Sears and Kmart stores were being merchandised, and I felt like it was time to see it for myself. What I saw was what I more or less expected based on what I saw online, but definitely not what someone might expect for a retail business that is still a going concern.
We first visited the Kmart on Connecticut Avenue, which is located less than a mile away from my old apartment on Hewitt Avenue. I knew this Kmart well enough, though I was never a regular there by any means. This is also the last Kmart in Maryland to remain a going concern, as the store in Edgewater is currently conducting a store-closing sale, and all of the other Kmart stores in Maryland are gone.
This is the state that the Aspen Hill store was in:
The exterior of the store.
Continue reading…Categories: Companies, Elyse, Friends, Retail, Silver Spring
The sounds of Metro…
2 minute read
January 18, 2020, 10:37 AM
Back on July 8, 2007, my friend Matthew and I went on a railfan adventure with a different purpose than we would usually do. Normally, a railfan adventure involved lots of photos and videos. This time, instead of a camera, we brought a laptop and a microphone. The goal was to get some audio recordings of the trains from the interior, for use in BVE, which is a train simulator program for Windows. We worked from the double-ended seats, which were located more or less directly over the wheel trucks and traction motors. I worked the laptop while wearing headphones, while Matthew held up the mic. I’ve never been a big train simulator enthusiast (I prefer watching the real thing vs. operating a simulator), so I don’t know if these recordings ever got used in any of the final versions of these trains, but I loved doing the field work for these sorts of community-built projects. I also did a set of Red Line announcements for the simulator. As I know, there has never been a commercially available train simulator for the DC Metro, so for that, I enjoyed contributing in a small way to what was the only WMATA train simulator out there.
Our adventure that day took us on the Red, Orange, and Blue Lines, and we got recordings of cars 3273 (Breda original), 3185 (Breda rehab), 5028 (CAF), and 1130 (Rohr).
Original Breda car 3273 from Forest Glen to Silver Spring
Categories: Arlington, Matthew, Silver Spring, Washington DC, WMATA
Remembering Snowpocalypse…
3 minute read
December 19, 2019, 11:40 PM
This weekend marks ten years since the “Snowpocalypse” storm came to the Washington region and blanketed the area with a couple of feet of snow. It was my first big snowstorm living in the Washington DC area, and it gave me my first snow day since college. While I was stuck at home, I photographed the snow quite a bit. After all, what else was I going to do while I was snowed in?
Snow coming down on Hewitt Avenue, seen from my apartment balcony, about four hours after the storm began.
Categories: Silver Spring, Snowpocalypse
Please don’t stop for me when I’m waiting to cross the street…
5 minute read
August 25, 2018, 1:51 PM
On Thursday, while I was waiting for a bus, I witnessed a near accident involving a pedestrian at a crosswalk on Layhill Road near Glenfield Local Park in the Glenmont area of Montgomery County. In other words, this location, seen from approximately my vantage point:
Image: Google Street View
This view is facing approximately south, putting the northbound lanes on the left and the southbound lanes on the right. There is a median in the middle of the road. Southbound traffic has a turnout for traffic making left turns into the park police station (entrance visible at left). There are wide bike lanes on either side of the road. There is also a Metro facility entrance at this location (out of frame to the right). This intersection is not a big one by any means. There are no signals. Ride On has a bus stop on either side of the road at this location.
Categories: Roads, Silver Spring
I’m not even going to try to recall how many times I made Elyse cross the street…
8 minute read
October 31, 2017, 2:30 PM
Here’s some “new old stock” for you. Back in March 2016, I had the idea of writing about a fatal pedestrian accident that happened in December 2015 at the intersection of Veirs Mill Road (MD 586) and the Matthew Henson Trail in Rockville. It was an area that I was very familiar with, as one of the routes that I did on the bus went through this area. I did the field work for that planned Journal entry, photographing the area in question, as well as a few other pedestrian control devices in Montgomery County, in order to have a discussion similar to the one I did in March 2013 about an intersection on Georgia Avenue. Unfortunately, however, life got in the way, as I got a promotion at work, and the several-months-long training program that came with that promotion took precedence over the planned Journal entry. The post eventually got shelved, and now it’s a moot point, as the intersection was initially upgraded with yellow warning signals directly over the crossing (vs. 500 feet ahead of it as before), and then after a second fatal accident in the same location, the crossing was upgraded again with signals that actually require traffic to stop vs. only warning drivers of the presence of pedestrians.
I was always a bit disappointed that an entire afternoon’s work never got used. Like the Breezewood photo shoot in 2006, evidence of the shoot showed up fairly soon after the work was done – in this case, a single photo feature – but the intended final product never got made. In hindsight, I’m not too worried about it, because what I would have advocated for in the intended Journal entry came to pass, though I wish that it hadn’t happened as a result of a second fatal accident.
The shoot itself was pretty fun. I brought Elyse with me, and we made a good team. The way we did it was that I set the camera up on my tripod and pointed it at whatever I needed, started filming, and then signaled to Elyse to activate the signal. She then crossed the street, in order to give some legitimacy to the signal activation. After all, I knew that I was stopping traffic on some fairly busy roads for a photo shoot. I had Elyse cross the street so that I didn’t look like a complete dick, stopping traffic for no reason. Someone needed to cross the street, so that it didn’t look like I was stopping traffic just to film the signals. I imagine that Elyse probably did about a mile going back and forth across several intersections in Montgomery County and DC. After all, every single take (and I did multiple takes) required activating a signal, and that meant sending Elyse across the street.
Categories: Elyse, Roads, Rockville, Silver Spring, Washington DC, Wheaton
Going to show that you never know what you’ll find at the thrift store…
4 minute read
July 30, 2017, 2:39 AM
It’s amazing what you find sometimes when you hit the thrift store. Case in point, at Unique Thrift Store/Value Village in Hillandale Shopping Center, Elyse and I found this:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Retail, Silver Spring, Today's Special
An afternoon at the Trolley Museum…
4 minute read
September 22, 2015, 11:20 PM
This past Sunday, I was at the National Capital Trolley Museum with Elyse. Unlike most days, where they only run one or two streetcars, this particular day, they were running four. They were running a streetcar from Brussels (by way of Grand Cypress Resort in Florida), a streetcar from New York City’s Third Avenue Railway, the 1971 PCC car from The Hague, as well as an open-air car referred to as “the boat“. We got to ride the first three, but the boat had already been brought in for the day by the time we got there. Ah, well, there’s always next time, as I literally only live two and a half miles away.
These are the cars that we got to ride. First, the former Brussels car:
Categories: Elyse, Silver Spring, Transit, WMATA
The speed van…
6 minute read
July 29, 2015, 9:04 PM
While I was out yesterday, I spotted this van parked on the side of Bonifant Road in Greater Silver Spring (Colesville) near the Trolley Museum and the Intercounty Connector bridge:
This is a white Ford Transit Connect van, with the “Montgomery County Safe Speed” logo on the driver’s side door. This struck me as something that merited further investigation, because the county has been using Bonifant Road to raise revenue through speed enforcement for years. I’ve seen police sitting on the road, and there have been fixed speed camera boxes in various places along this road over the years.
Categories: Driving, Silver Spring
This is a message that I can get behind…
< 1 minute read
May 6, 2015, 4:58 PM
This message recently went up on the sign for the church up the street from me:
Couldn’t have said it any better than that. No religious overtones, and nothing cheesy. Just a nice message to help put things in perspective. Be someone that makes you happy. After all, we only have one life to live, and it’s far too short to spend it being miserable about yourself. Be the person that you want to be.
That is all.
Categories: Religion, Silver Spring
Driving around Montgomery County…
2 minute read
March 9, 2014, 1:25 PM
For my commercial driving class, I had to watch others’ driving to identify distracted and at-risk driving behaviors and document them. Normally one would do this while another student was driving the bus, but since I’m the only student in the class, I am doing this as homework. Since I had some issue with making the arrangements for someone else to drive me around so that I could write, I decided to take matters into my own hands and attach my cell phone to the visor to make a movie of my own driving for later analysis. In other words, something like this:
Categories: Driving, Rockville, Silver Spring
And once again, braaaaaaaaaaains…
5 minute read
October 31, 2013, 10:27 PM
One of the things I enjoy about Silver Spring is the annual zombie walk. Last year’s zombie event was kind of ho-hum, considering that, for a number of reasons, it wasn’t a formal zombie walk, but rather, more a night for people to go out and drink while dressed up as zombies. The zombie walk in 2011, which followed the usual model of a meetup, a walk, and then a movie, was much more fun. This year’s zombie event followed the 2011 model, since as I believe that everyone realized that zombies without a walk was not nearly as fun (even if a lot of it was due to circumstances outside the organizers’ control).
That said, I had a lot of fun, as expected. The zombie costumes were pretty gruesome, and there were also a few zombie hunters out there, too. The surprise of the night, though, was that the zombie walk was rerouted at the last minute. Turns out that someone made a bomb threat at the Majestic, a movie theater at the corner of Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street in Silver Spring. The theater was evacuated, and since it was along the zombie walk’s route, the undead needed to be rerouted, which took the walk further east than originally planned, and approached the AFI Silver Theater, where a horror movie would be shown, from the east rather than from the west.
I also discovered that, in the hands of the right person, clowns can be made to look very scary. I had always laughed about the “clowns are scary” bit, but some of the people playing undead clowns on this particular evening created fuel for nightmares. And yes, you’re going to see them.
Categories: Halloween, Silver Spring
This is a problem where the biggest step towards a solution is not police, but signage and paint…
7 minute read
March 12, 2013, 10:16 PM
According to an article on Patch.com, since January 22, four pedestrians and one cyclist have died in collisions with cars in the eastern part of Montgomery County. The cyclist was struck in downtown Silver Spring. The pedestrian fatalities all occurred outside the Beltway. One involved a woman’s being struck while on the sidewalk, and the other three were struck and killed while attempting to cross major arterial roads in the county – specifically, Columbia Pike (US 29), Connecticut Avenue (MD 185), and Georgia Avenue (MD 97). Ken Silverman, an analyst for county councilwoman Nancy Navarro, created a map showing the location of the accidents.
Now in looking at all of this, I latched onto the fatalities related to crossing the arterials. I am on each side of the pedestrian-driver coin in Montgomery County at various times, and so I am familiar with both driving around pedestrians, and walking around cars. I have also crossed Georgia Avenue on foot many times. In these instances, the Columbia Pike incident happened in the southbound lanes at the intersection with Oak Leaf Drive in White Oak. The Connecticut Avenue incident happened at the intersection with Everton Street, in the Wheaton area. The Georgia Avenue incident occurred at the intersection with Heathfield Road in Aspen Hill. I looked at these areas, and there are some common factors in all of them:
- All three incidents occurred after dark
- All three incidents occurred at unmarked crosswalks (any intersection is considered a legal crosswalk in Maryland whether it’s marked or not)
- The main roadway in all three locations is a six-lane divided highway with three lanes on each side
- There are bus stops on both sides of the road at all three locations
- There is street lighting on the side of the road where the incidents occurred (Columbia Pike and Georgia Avenue have lighting on only one side in these areas, and Connecticut Avenue has lighting on both sides)
Categories: DC area local news, Silver Spring
Driving in Virginia on Thanksgiving morning…
6 minute read
November 22, 2012, 7:04 PM
First of all, greetings from Stuarts Draft, where I will be through Sunday. And so far, so good. The drive went surprisingly well, and then Thanksgiving dinner was absolutely wonderful.
Considering how well my drive went today, though, I don’t know why anyone would want to go driving on the day before Thanksgiving. Seriously, this was one of the easiest drives to Stuarts Draft that I’ve had in a long time. I left the house around 8:45, and it was more or less smooth sailing the entire way. Georgia Avenue in Montgomery County, from my house to the Beltway, was no problem.
On that note, by the way, does anyone know what’s going on with the Freestate gas station on Georgia Avenue at Layhill Road? This is how it looked this morning:
Categories: Clothing, Driving, Family, Kia Soul, Language, National politics, Sheetz, Silver Spring, Thanksgiving, Weight loss
Zombie night in Silver Spring!
5 minute read
October 28, 2012, 11:00 PM
So October 27 was the night of the annual Silver Spring Zombie Walk. Except this year, for various reasons, there was no actual zombie walk through the downtown area of Silver Spring. It was just zombie night, where there were a bunch of events for kids and adults, but no single, unifying event like in years past. I knew this going in, and knowing there was no specific zombie walk but rather just a night of zombie-related fun and festivities, I decided to just see what I could see.
Not surprisingly, it was a little bit underwhelming. I wasn’t about to hit the bars and take pictures of adults drinking in zombie costumes. The best players in last year’s zombie walk were the kids, and so I tried to stick to the areas where most of the family entertainment would be held, around Ellsworth Drive, while still getting around the full downtown area a bit.
On Ellsworth Drive, in the “Downtown Silver Spring” development, the younger set was out and about. Some of them were remarkably scary/creepy specifically because they were kids and looked a little too wholesome to be spattered with blood and looking all undead. Like these two:
Add the blank expressions to the mix, and you have nightmare fuel right there. Great costumes, great playing of the part, but still creepy. Good work.
Categories: Halloween, Silver Spring
A whole bunch of bowling videos…
4 minute read
October 22, 2012, 10:09 PM
I realized tonight that I had never shown you some funny bowling videos that my friend Matthew and I had made a while back. Matthew and I will, as I’ve demonstrated before, go bowling from time to time. We always have a lot of fun, but considering that Matthew is a far better bowler than I am, the object of the game for me is to see how close I can come to matching his score. I’ve discussed our first time doing ten-pin together and our first time doing duckpins together before, but I never showed you our second run of each style.
Now on the first time for each, I wasn’t sure how the various bowling alley operators viewed photography, plus I was concentrating a bit more on what I was doing. After all, I had not done ten-pin in seven years before our first time bowling together in 2009, and then neither one of us had ever done duckpins before when we did that in August 2009. Now, I have come to realize that the operators of these bowling alleys really don’t care if you’re taking videos and stills of yourself (plus I’m just using my phone here rather than my real camera), plus I’ve gotten a bit more comfortable with the whole bowling thing overall. Additionally, there’s a certain fun part of acting in front of the camera in these sorts of situations. After all, there’s a certain bit of structure to these things, because you know the general idea of the afternoon, i.e. throw the ball and knock down some pins. But how one gets from A to B is where the fun comes in.
This first bunch of videos was from December 3, 2011, when Matthew and I were doing ten-pin at Bowl America in Reston.
Categories: Matthew, Recreation/Exercise, Silver Spring