What is Afton Mountain, anyway?
8 minute read
March 21, 2013, 5:58 PM
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this article by Dr. Christopher M. Bailey, a geology professor at The College of William & Mary. The article discusses the name of a place that many people in the part of Virginia that I grew up with are most likely quite familiar with: Afton Mountain.
The article is titled, “Mind the Gap! Where is Afton Mountain?” and discusses the geology of the area, specifically Rockfish Gap, and a few quirks of the local culture. First, for those not familiar, Rockfish Gap is a wind gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which separate the Shenandoah Valley and the Piedmont region in Virginia. Because it is the lowest gap for quite some ways traveling both north and south, the area became an important way to travel east and west. Today, Interstate 64 and US 250 carry travelers through Rockfish Gap.
Technically speaking, this is Rockfish Gap, seen here in a 2003 Schumin Web file photo:
Continue reading…Categories: Afton Mountain, Nature, Roads
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
This really isn’t rocket science, I promise…
6 minute read
January 10, 2013, 1:28 AM
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the act of placing groceries in bags and giving them back to the customer is really not rocket science. And in Montgomery County, Maryland, a jurisdiction where there is an excise tax on disposable shopping bags, i.e. a financial incentive to use reusable shopping bags, I don’t believe that it is unreasonable of me to think that a grocery store cashier should know how to handle reusable shopping bags. Apparently this is an unreasonable expectation. I went to the Safeway store in Olney this evening after I went swimming, and the cashier did not understand how to handle reusable bags.
This what I bought:
(And for those of you who are wondering, I took this photo in the store with the intention of posting on Instagram.)
Categories: Olney, Retail, Safeway, Some people
The Walters Art Gallery and Great Falls…
4 minute read
January 6, 2013, 9:42 PM
So as promised, this is the photos-from-Baltimore-and-Great-Falls post. Right after Christmas, Mom came up to visit for three days. We certainly had fun while we were out. We went out to Montgomery Mall, we went to Baltimore, we went to Arundel Mills, we went to Great Falls, and we had dinner with friends.
Montgomery Mall was pretty much what you would expect. After-Christmas sales and all that jazz. Mom did, however, leave me a bit scandalized when she went into Abercrombie and Fitch just to pay the five-cent bag tax to get one of the bags with the picture of the guy with the six-pack abs on it. I commented:
This must somehow be payback for all the times that I may have embarrassed her in the past. Especially when I brought the little green reusable bags that I take with me to go grocery shopping.
Categories: Baltimore, Family, Nature, Photography
ZooLights!
7 minute read
December 23, 2012, 2:10 PM
You can tell that my life has been busy lately. This happened a week ago and only now am I finally getting a chance to write about it. Nonetheless, though, I had fun last weekend. I got together with my friend Melissa, who I know through a few Anons, and who I first met at the Silver Spring Zombie Walk in 2011. We went around the mall in Wheaton a bit, and then headed into DC for ZooLights at the National Zoo. That was a lot of fun.
First of all, I had not been to the National Zoo in ages. I think that the last time I was at the zoo was, I believe, the summer of 1996. Back then, Mom and Sis and I went on a weekday, and I remember its being my first time ever making any sort of Metro transfer, and my first time on the Red Line. Prior to that trip, we had been to Washington a few times, but never before had we done anything other than one train. I took the Blue Line on my first trip, and several Orange Line rides. That first transfer was interesting, because I had never been to Metro Center before, nor had I ever transferred. It had never crossed my mind that one line crossed over the other. Then when we got to the zoo, I recall our being not so impressed with it at that time. But at the same time, it was also really hot out and I was not doing well on the hill that the zoo is built on due to my being somewhat out of shape.
Back in the present, though, I’m in really good shape, and it’s time to see Christmas-themed lighting. I will admit that I had some fun (in a mean way) with the identity of the main sponsor for ZooLights: Pepco. Pepco, you may recall, is the for-profit utility that has the notoriously unreliable power grid in DC, Montgomery County, and PG County, and that keeps asking for permission to raise rates. My comment was that with Pepco sponsoring it, I was somewhat surprised that the lights were even on, considering that they often have problems with that.
Categories: Christmas, Melissa, Retail, Washington DC, Wheaton
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
And this is what Shenandoah Acres looks like now…
3 minute read
September 21, 2012, 9:01 PM
So while I was out and about today, I got new photos of Shenandoah Acres as a follow-up to my previous Journal entry on Shenandoah Acres. And if you ask me, it was kind of depressing. Take a look:
One of two platforms in the lake, and the 1997 beach house. To give you an idea of the normal lake level, the platform was less than a foot above the water level, and the platform was completely surrounded by water.
Categories: Shenandoah Acres, Stuarts Draft
A train ride with far more excitement than you might expect…
4 minute read
September 19, 2012, 9:21 PM
This is also why, when I’m traveling on a public mode of transportation, the idea is to leave early so that I can be at the boarding location in plenty of time, just in case anything goes wrong in the process. Today was one of those days where something went wrong. I described it as a “clusterf—“, and I think that was putting it nicely.
First of all, though, to set things up: I’m in Stuarts Draft right now, and I went there on Amtrak’s westbound Cardinal. To get there, my plan was to take the 51 from my house to Glenmont, and then take the Red Line to Union Station. Initially, things went well. I caught the same 51 that I usually get to go to work, and caught my Red Line train.
And then things went downhill from there.
The Red Line was having a power problem on Track 2 at Brentwood Yard. Thus they had to single track through the yard, during morning rush hour. Whenever you hear “single tracking” and “rush hour” in the same sentence, by the way, that’s never a good sign. So at Glenmont, we sat for several minutes before we started the run – much longer than usual. Then we proceeded to Wheaton and held again. No hold at Forest Glen. Then we held for about ten minutes each at Silver Spring and Takoma.
And then things got worse. There was a second power problem on the Red Line at Van Ness-UDC, with single tracking over there, too. Lovely. By this point, Metro was telling people in the e-alerts to consider taking the Green Line. That’s when you know it’s bad. With two areas of single tracking, I bailed at Fort Totten and took the Green Line.
What to do with Shenandoah Acres?
8 minute read
September 2, 2012, 8:39 PM
For the last few years, I have been involved in a Facebook group called “Remembering Shenandoah Acres“. This group is built around discussing memories of times spent at the Shenandoah Acres resort in Stuarts Draft that closed after the 2004 season, but most discussions anymore center around complaining about the state that the property is now in.
For those not familiar, Shenandoah Acres was a facility that billed itself as “America’s Finest Inland Beach”, owned and operated by the Blacka family for many years. It had a campground, there were cabins, and a motel building on the property. The facility also had tennis courts, trail rides on horseback, and miniature golf. However, the centerpiece of the facility was a manmade lake with a beach around it, playground equipment in the water (including one slide about two or three stories high), and a large tower in the center that offered a zip line ride. The facility was a popular tourist attraction, and the lake was also very popular with locals during the summer season.
In the years that I’ve been familiar with the facility, one of the merry go rounds in the water was replaced in 1995 by “Clyde the Slyde”, which was a small slide built inside a dinosaur sculpture, and the zip lines were dismantled in the late 1990s or early 2000s and replaced with the “Pink Zipper” water slide. Additionally, the roof of the original beach house collapsed due to excessive snowfall in 1997, and was replaced with a new structure slightly to the northeast of the original. The facility closed after the 2004 season because, according to the owner at the time, whom my family went to church with, the cost of insurance finally became too much to bear. My family went to Shenandoah Acres from 1993 until about 1996.
Categories: Shenandoah Acres, Stuarts Draft
And the fruit is photographed…
4 minute read
August 5, 2012, 9:00 PM
At last, it is done. I went down to Eastern Market earlier today and did something that I said I’d wanted to do for a while: photograph food. I visited most of the food vendors over there and photographed the fresh fruits and vegetables that were out for sale. I photographed so many different kinds of tomatoes, peppers, and mushrooms that it’s not even funny. I certainly got a lesson in foods, though. I didn’t realize that tomatoes came in so many different colors. First, there’s this one, which looks pretty conventional, at least to my grocery store shopping eyes:
Categories: Photography, Washington DC, Weather
Renovations at Union Station!
2 minute read
July 25, 2012, 2:16 PM
This is my traditional posted-from-Club-Acela-at-Union-Station Journal entry, because I’m going to be on a train to Chicago with my mother within the hour. Should be fun. However, at Union Station, I was surprised to see a lot of netting and scaffolding in the Main Hall. Last time I was at Union Station, which was in October for the anti-Walmart demonstration, this wasn’t there. From what I can find, this scaffolding and netting is for ceiling repairs necessitated by damage from the earthquake that happened last August.
In any event, it’s pretty neat looking, seeing all of this extra hardware in what is otherwise a very clean looking Main Hall:
Lights under the scaffolding around the statues on the west side of the Main Hall.
Categories: Amtrak, Washington DC
Schumin Web after dark…
6 minute read
July 8, 2012, 7:38 PM
And apparently my life after dark, at least last night, was a bar, two buses, and four Green Line trains. So cue up the “Fireside” music, because here it is. I went into DC in order to hang out with Christina, a friend and former coworker, one more time before she moves to Hawaii. I’m quite happy for her, because she’s wanted to move to Hawaii for a long time. However, I’ll miss her in DC. That’s why this evening was special.
Getting there, though, was a little more exciting than I expected. The bar where we were going to was The Passenger, across 7th Street NW from the convention center. I considered this to be a good opportunity to go see some of the new Rush+ signage that Metro had put up, that would include new station names and slightly different train movements. I had originally decided to go in on the Green Line to avoid a shutdown on my neck of the Red Line, but after a heat kink fouled the Green Line on Friday evening, the planned shutdown on the Red Line was cancelled and it moved to the Green Line instead. I didn’t realize that there was a shutdown on the Green Line until I got to Greenbelt station, but decided to just roll with it rather than get back in the car. It’s okay, you see. I did, however, spot an amusing license plate on the way in at Greenbelt station:
“CIAO BB”, a play on “Ciao, baby!”
Categories: Friends, Washington DC, WMATA
Montgomery County is definitely not itself right now…
5 minute read
June 30, 2012, 5:06 PM
And that’s putting it lightly. A very big storm blew through the DC area on Friday night, and the results were not pretty. As I understand it, the weather event was called a derecho, and the effects of such a phenomenon were painfully obvious for those of us in Montgomery County. Remember back in 2010, when that big storm came up out of nowhere and left much of Montgomery County without power? It seems that history has repeated itself. This storm blew through, and took out trees all over the place, and with that came power lines, and that left Montgomery County in the dark. According to WUSA, out of 305,000 Pepco customers in Montgomery County, 210,000 of them currently don’t have electricity, and out of 800 traffic lights in the county, 500 of them don’t work on account of power outages. And unfortunately, I am part of the two-thirds of Montgomery County that doesn’t have power. I lost power on Friday night. The lights went on and off a few times, and then went out for good. And they’re still out.
And with so much of the county in the dark, people’s patterns changed. First of all, getting around is a real pain. With five out of eight traffic lights down (and no rhyme or reason about which lights are dead), we have been told all over to treat dark traffic signals like four-way stops, which slows things down. From what I can tell, there are four ways that intersections with traffic lights are treated in these sorts of situations. First are the lights that work. Those function as they always do. Then there are the really big intersections, which have police officers directing traffic through them. Then the bigger intersections but that aren’t as big as the others get these little portable stop signs between the lanes to remind drivers that they are supposed to treat the intersection as a four-way stop. And then finally, most intersections with dark lights are just left dark without any signage or personnel on scene, and drivers are expected to be courteous to each other and stop before proceeding.
Categories: Silver Spring, Washington DC, Weather, Wheaton