If you can imagine this…
2 minute read
December 18, 2006, 7:53 PM
Picture with me if you will…
I’m walking up Diagonal Road in Alexandria towards the Old Town Transit Shop, and right when I get there, I hear a loud crashing sound and see sparks. Then I see a tire rolling down towards King Street station. A gentleman in a red SUV actually dropped a wheel! Literally dropped a wheel, as the left front wheel separated from the car and, now liberated, went rolling on its own down the hill. My exact reaction was to say a four-letter word that I can’t say in this space. So I went in to see my friend Tristan, and what did we do? We went outside to look. We both couldn’t believe that this guy had dropped a wheel. But the car was visibly off-kilter, leaning down in the direction of that missing wheel. I’m sure that the guy was not happy about that.
Otherwise, I had a lovely walk in Georgetown, discovering The Shops at Georgetown Park, which is a very expensive three-story shopping mall on M Street. I got a few pictures of it, and I’m going to tell Sis about it, since she loves to shop. Those of you who have seen the movie First Kid will know Georgetown Park, since that is the place where the big hostage/shootout scene happens.
Continue reading…Categories: Alexandria, DC trips, Washington DC
Does anyone know…
< 1 minute read
November 29, 2006, 8:21 PM
Does anyone know the location and/or purpose of a beacon or searchlight in Rockingham County, Virginia just south of Harrisonburg? I first noticed it in 2003 when I was commuting to JMU, and I gave it some more serious thought about what it was last night when I most recently saw it. And I see it on most trips through that area at night.
It appears to originate west of Interstate 81 and US 11, appearing to originate from Bridgewater, or just south of there. I’ve never actually seen the device that this light originates from – just the light itself. The beam of light is white, and it moves in a clockwise direction at a fast speed. If you’ve ever seen the way a lighthouse’s beam moves, it’s about the same.
To see the area I’m referring to, here’s a map. The beacon appears to originate from west of the highway (left on that map). The furthest north I’ve been able to see it is at Exit 240, which is the Mt. Crawford/Bridgewater exit on I-81, the junction of I-81 and Friedens Church Road. The furthest south I’ve seen it is just north of the Augusta County line. The boundary between the two counties is not marked on the map, but to give you a general idea, it’s a straight northwest-to-southeast line just north of Fadley Road and Weyers Cave Road (Route 256).
So my question is, has anyone else seen this particular bit of light? Does anyone know where it’s actually located? Does anyone know what its purpose is? If you know what it is, I would like to know!
Categories: Driving, Harrisonburg
A photo set update for you now…
2 minute read
November 23, 2006, 2:13 AM
Every so often, as you know, I like to give updates on photo sets, like when things have changed. I think the most notable update has to be in my Afton Mountain photo set, where the Skyline Parkway Motel was torched ten months after I did the set.
This time, though, it’s a DC area update. You remember when I did Urban Demolition? That showed 1117 North 19th Street in the process of being demolished. Then when I did If These Streets Could Talk about a month and a half later, the site was simply a hole in the ground. The most recent update on that site that I provided was in Part 2 of my Year In Review photo set. There, it was still mostly a hole in the ground, but new structural elements were starting to take shape.
Now, check this out:
Categories: Arlington, Schumin Web meta
Sometimes, the way I set up a shot is amusing…
2 minute read
October 22, 2006, 1:02 AM
I’m looking at the photo feature I’m running right now, described as “Headlights illuminate a sign marking the Buena Vista overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.” What I find amusing is how I used practically everything I had with me except for the Blistex that I keep in my camera bag in order to get this shot. Seriously. Even the Sable got into the act. Where do you think the headlights that illuminated the sign came from? Sa-a-a-a-a-able…
I was actually trying to get a nice long-exposure shot of the sign, which is how this all came about. The sun was down enough to where the shot would come out dark, but light enough to where it would be blue. So I fiddled with things, and also, since I was parked right in front of the sign, I fiddled with my headlights to get things how I wanted. In the shot I ultimately used, I timed things. I set the camera up at an eight-second exposure, and then using the remote, unlocked my doors (which makes the headlights come on) with two seconds to go. I used other exposures and length of time with the headlights on as well, but that’s the one that looked the way I liked.
I also had some fun taking some long-exposure shots of the Sable while I was up there in the dark, with the tripod all set up. I reached into the car and hit the switch for the interior and door lights. Then I fired off a few long-exposure shots of that. Thus we have the Sable, an island of light in the midst of darkness…
Categories: Blue Ridge Parkway, Photography
Photos of mine, printed ABOVE the fold…
2 minute read
August 28, 2006, 7:51 AM
How often can you say that your photos end up on the front page of the local newspaper? And above the fold, no less. If you look at the August 28, 2006 edition of The News Virginian, you will see two photos anchoring an article about the Skyline Parkway Motel, which, you may recall, had been abandoned for some time, and then was torched in 2004. Both of them are tagged with “Photo courtesy of BEN SCHUMIN”. Here are the photos that the newspaper ran:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Skyline Parkway Motel, Virginia local news, Wikipedia
Should we call it “close encounters of the deered kind”?
< 1 minute read
August 24, 2006, 3:18 AM
The Blue Ridge Parkway is very quickly becoming a dangerous place for the Sable. And before you ask, no, I did not hit another deer (thank goodness). But I did have a close encounter near the Rockfish Valley Parking Overlook. This deer was along the side of the road, minding its own business. I kept an eye on it as soon as I spotted it, waiting for it to make a move. It sees me. It did that deer-in-the-headlights thing. Then, as I continued, it just darted out in front of me. I slammed the brakes, enough to activate the anti-lock brakes. It was a close encounter, but we missed each other.
I contemplated adding deer whistles to the Sable after the repairs are completed, but according to this article, this article, and this article, they’re junk. So that goes out the window.
I don’t know what it is, but it seems that the deer are really out and about this year. I didn’t see nearly as many deer on the Parkway this time last year.
Categories: Blue Ridge Parkway, Mercury Sable
Just make them an offer that they CAN refuse…
2 minute read
August 17, 2006, 8:11 PM
First of all, hello from Pentagon City.
I went over to Brookstone while here, and they have this new device that you sit on that’s supposed to work your body as if you’re riding a horse. Okay, fine. So I got on, I sat down, and I gave it a whirl. I made some interesting faces while riding that thing, trying to maintain my balance on there.
So then this group of teenaged girls comes in. They see me on the thing, unbeknownst to me. I got off. They want to see me ride it again. I said, “No thank you, I’ve already ridden it. Why don’t you give it a try?” They declined. They want to see ME do it again. I declined again. Then they start offering me money. One girl offers a quarter. Another a penny. Then someone ponies up a dollar. I still refuse.
I got this feeling that they were making fun of me. And I was through riding that contraption and that was all there was to it. So when they asked how much it would take to get me to ride it again, I went for the big guns. “Fifty bucks,” I said. They were quite shocked at the price I named, and left, which is what I wanted them to do. Because when you’re being made fun of, it’s best to one-up them. And one-upping a group of unsupervised teenaged girls that all share one brain amongst the lot of them is not hard to do.
Seeing these groups of teenagers at Pentagon City makes me think that putting these various groups from out of town in chain gangs is not a particularly bad idea. Since the adult leaders of these groups use Pentagon City as a way to cut these children loose while they go take a smoke or something. So they subject the rest of us, the well-behaved members of society, to these obnoxious children.
Categories: Arlington, DC trips, Retail, Some people
“So who gets the deer: me or the dog?”
3 minute read
August 15, 2006, 1:08 AM
I am sad to announce that my Sable got into its first accident tonight on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I hit a deer. I was going southbound at 40 mph (five below the posted speed limit of 45), and two deer darted out in front of me closely enough that I didn’t have time to stop or swerve. I barely cleared the first one, and then I nailed the second one head-on in the body. That deer bounced off the front of the car, and then rolled stiff-legged off the road and landed in the grass. It looked as if it was one-piece construction and not a real deer, because no parts of the body moved – the whole thing just rolled off, appearing completely rigid. I don’t know what happened to it from there, because I couldn’t stop right there due to lack of available shoulder space. The rule is that if you stop on the Parkway, you have to have all four wheels off the road. I was able to accomplish this about a quarter mile down the road.
Thankfully, the Sable survived intact for the most part. The deer left a big dent in the right fender, left a dent in the hood, and jarred the grille loose, but the car was driveable, and both headlights survived intact. I was not injured at all, though I can’t say the same for the deer. I guess the best way to describe the Sable’s post-deer condition is “walking wounded”, since it walked away from the accident, but didn’t make it out unscathed.
I initially tried to call 1-800-PARKWATCH (Blue Ridge Parkway emergency dispatch) from the accident scene, but got no signal. So I drove up to the nearby Boston Knob overlook, and after two tries, I got a good signal, and reported the accident. They got my contact information, and said that a ranger would call me and do the accident report over the phone.
Categories: Blue Ridge Parkway, Mercury Sable
Free at last!
3 minute read
August 14, 2006, 4:04 PM
The detour is done! The complete rebuilding of Route 608 (Cold Springs Road) has been completed, and so now we have our road back.
To give you a little background information, for the past six months, those who live in my neighborhood have had to go this way to get to US 340 and on to Waynesboro, marked in red:
Image: Google Maps
All that distance to get out of the neighborhood. And the work area, meaning the section of road that was closed, is the section of road in between the green arrows. To give you a comparison, the regular way to 340 is as follows:
Categories: Religion, Roads, Stuarts Draft
I don’t know where that hand has been…
2 minute read
July 3, 2006, 8:35 AM
I’m going to say it straight up: I don’t like handshakes. And here’s why: I don’t know where that hand has been, and most people aren’t as meticulous about their hand washing as I am. Whenever someone shakes my hand, my first instinct is to find a restroom and re-wash the hand that was shaken. I also have to suppress the urge to smell the hand that they just shook (to see how dirty that hand was) right in front of them, and to wait until after they’re out of sight before going into “damage control” mode.
I don’t know why it is, but I don’t like handshakes for that reason. I don’t know whether the person whose hand I’m shaking washed their hands when they last used the restroom, or what that hand has been up to and into since the last time it saw soap.
The reason I mention this is because I was over in Charlottesville on Sunday night, doing some night photography over in the Corner District, which borders the University of Virginia. The bars and restaurants in the Corner are popular places for UVA students to go to get “polluted”, shall we say. Now when I’m photographing with the tripod, I’m far more noticeable than when I’m photographing without it, since I take up more sidewalk space, and have to be more stationary as a result. So I get far more attention than otherwise. And the males, some of whom smell of beer, more often than not want to shake my hand. It would be quite rude to say, “I’m not touching that!” and so I just go ahead and shake. And then I feel unclean afterwards.
Categories: Charlottesville, Myself
I visited Foamhenge, and it was…
< 1 minute read
July 1, 2006, 6:25 PM
I visited Foamhenge in Natural Bridge today. It was interesting. Realize that Natural Bridge itself is something interesting. It’s a little collection of roadside attractions on US 11 in basically the middle of nowhere. There’s the natural bridge itself (for which Rockbridge County gets its name), plus there’s Natural Bridge Zoo, a wax museum, and probably other stuff I’m not remembering.
But this is Foamhenge:
Categories: Photography, Places
I didn’t know this existed!
< 1 minute read
June 29, 2006, 8:21 PM
I had no idea that there was a place called “Foamhenge” near Natural Bridge, which is a little ways south of where I live. And with my being on vacation this week, and with the weather forecasted to be nice all the way through the weekend, I might just have to pay Foamhenge a visit, and perhaps do a photo set on it (as if I’m not backlogged enough already).
And no, this is not some cheesy substitute for a visit to the real Stonehenge. I went there in June 1998. See?
Eight years after visiting Stonehenge, a visit to Foamhenge should be fun.
Categories: Places
An interesting little trip…
4 minute read
June 29, 2006, 5:37 PM
I took a little trip to the DC area via Richmond and I-95 on Wednesday. Fun trip. I went that longer way instead of my usual I-81 to I-66 route because I wanted to visit Fredericksburg and Potomac Mills.
My visit to Fredericksburg was fairly simple. The question before the house was whether it was worth it to make a trip to Fredericksburg, which is somewhat hard to reach for a day trip, to do a photo set. My determination for Fredericksburg was that while it was indeed charming, and definitely a place to visit when I eventually find a job in the DC area and move up that way, I didn’t see anything on this drive through that I would really want to make a special trip for, and that I couldn’t do using a similar feature in another city that is easier to reach.
However, I did see a sign that was, to say the least, surprising.
Categories: Alexandria, DC trips, Driving, Retail, Washington DC, WMATA
And here are the photos of the ark, as promised.
< 1 minute read
June 29, 2006, 2:20 PM
As promised, here are some photos of the ark from the upcoming movie Evan Almighty in Crozet:
“I don’t look at porn!”
2 minute read
June 18, 2006, 2:35 AM
Funny what comes up in the breakroom sometimes…
A few of us were discussing churchgoers and possible hypocrisy regarding them, and the idea came up that a particular coworker, about whom customers had said “looked like Jesus” when he had a certain hairdo coupled with a beard, should start his own church. Someone suggested that he would make one related to porn, which elicited the response, “I don’t look at porn!”
What made us all turn our heads was when another coworker, who was just passing through the breakroom to get to the smoking room and caught wind of our discussion, said, “I do!”
The thought that crossed most of our minds was, I did not need to know that. Seriously, we did not need to know that. I don’t think I’ll be able to look at this coworker with a straight face for a while. Of course, people didn’t look at me with a straight face for a while after the pants incident from a couple of months ago.
Categories: Blue Ridge Parkway, Some people, Walmart