I am now in my forties…
2 minute read
June 4, 2021, 3:42 PM
This past Sunday, I turned 40. I remember the first time that I heard about someone turning 40. In that case, it was Uncle Johnny, i.e. Mom’s brother, back when I was still in my single digits. That age sounded so old for someone who was in elementary school. It was more than four times the age that I was at the time, and seemed so far off. And now I’m there. Uncle Johnny, meanwhile, is now in his seventies, and he and Aunt Beth are retired and living their best life.
My actual birthday, meanwhile, was pretty quiet, by my choice. At work, it’s in our union contract that we are guaranteed to have our birthday off as a “floating holiday”, but I opted to work on my birthday and take the holiday the next day in order to have a three-day weekend. This was also a bit of a weird birthday, because I definitely had a mental hang-up about turning 40. I watched all of my classmates from high school post about turning 40 on Facebook, and I couldn’t help but think that it felt wrong for all of these young people that I went to school with to be turning 40. I didn’t really want to turn 40, because 40 felt old. You weren’t “young” anymore, but instead were “middle aged”. Funny thing, though, is that I have one friend who acted like his life was practically over when he turned 40 a few years ago, and I had to reassure him that it wasn’t the case, and here I was having a hang-up myself over “40 is old”. The morning of my birthday, I woke up, thought to myself, I’m 40!, mentally groaned for a moment, and then rolled over and went back to sleep for another hour.
But then after I got to work, I got to thinking (operating the train gives you lots of time to think), and I realized that I was 40, but I didn’t feel any different than I did the day before, when I was still 39. I soon came to realize that it was going to be okay. I didn’t feel old. I felt just as good as ever. Sure, I have a few lines where there were no lines before, and a lot of things sag now (mainly from the weight loss), and I have to hold things a little bit further away from my face in order to read them than I used to, but all in all, I’m doing pretty well. But don’t get me wrong – I still hate birthday greetings.
So now that I’m in my forties, here’s to another decade of adventures, I suppose.
I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…
23 minute read
May 25, 2021, 9:37 PM
On Friday, May 14, 2021, a number of state governments rescinded emergency orders requiring the wearing of face masks in public for people who have had all of their shots for COVID-19, i.e. “fully vaccinated”, on the heels of earlier announcements providing dates for when nearly all COVID restrictions would be removed. And with that, I think that it is safe to say that we’re finally on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that life will return to normal. Ever since the middle of March 2020, when the response to a novel coronavirus started becoming out of proportion to the actual threat, and fear began driving the narrative, I’ve been looking forward to this time, when the world finally started returning to normal.
Truth be told, I took a dim view of the official response to this thing from the beginning. From the outset, my stance has been that almost all of these various “precautions” were unnecessary, and that the best advice for the public was (A) wash your hands at frequent intervals, and (B) be careful about how much you touch your face. This is the same advice that we give about nearly every communicable disease, and it’s served us quite well. I didn’t see any reason why this one should have been any different. Lockdowns, social distancing, masks, limits on gathering sizes, closed restaurants, closed drinking fountains, plexiglass shields, one-way aisles, contactless everything, the constant cleaning and “sanitizing”, temperature checks, and all of the rest of it is all just security theater, i.e. “the practice of taking security measures that are intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it.” In other words, these measures were there primarily to placate a certain vocal subset of people who were afraid, and their fear was then projected onto the rest of us. In the end, though, as long as there was no vaccine for it, there was nothing that most of us could reasonably do to prevent its transmission. It was a problem that was beyond most of our capabilities to solve. With that in mind, I wasn’t worried about it, and trusted that the scientists whose job it was to solve it would come through. For the rest of us, there was only one single action that was “doing our part”. That action was getting vaccinated against COVID-19 when it became available. Nothing else made a bit of difference. But until that time came when a vaccine was available, we just had to wait.
Unfortunately, though, we all know how much people hate to be told that they have to wait for something to be solved, and can’t do anything about it in the meantime – especially when they’re scared. And for a mass hysteria event, we apparently just can’t have that. Unfortunately, telling people to wait doesn’t look good for politicians, whose constituents will demand that something be done about it after the media has whipped them up into a frenzy – especially during an election year when many of them were trying to keep their jobs. You know that people would practically crucify any elected official who got up and said, “I’m sorry, but there is really nothing in my power that I can do to solve this at this time. Until a vaccine becomes available, we just have to wait.” So, instead, they pander to the masses, going out and doing things that make it look like they’re doing something, i.e. security theater. When they make it look like they’re doing something, the masses eat it right up. They stepped in and shut down businesses (and destroyed many people’s livelihoods in the process – see my Gordmans entry), enforced social distancing rules on everyone, and required masks. Everyone was impacted in some way, and it sure looked like something was being done while we waited. Especially with the use of mask mandates, they put the pandemic in your face – and on your face – all the bloody time. As far as the politicians were concerned, mission accomplished.
Continue reading…Categories: COVID-19, National politics, News, Social media, State and local politics
A flight over JMU…
4 minute read
May 15, 2021, 2:12 PM
On May 10, while Elyse and I were on a weekend trip down to the Shenandoah Valley to see the parents and such, we stopped at JMU, and I took the drone for a flight over the far side of campus across Interstate 81. That is a part of campus that has definitely changed since I was a student, as it’s a lot more built up than it used to be. There are lots of buildings over there that weren’t there when I attended. There’s also a new indoor arena over there called the Atlantic Union Bank Center, or, as the folks on Reddit have taken to calling it, the “Algerdome”, after JMU’s current president, Jonathan Alger. I flew from a facility that was new since I was there, on the roof of a massive parking garage next to the Algerdome, built on the former site of Blue Ridge Hall. That higher vantage point was helpful because it gave me a better line of sight to my aircraft and a better signal for my remote, as there were fewer buildings getting in my way up there.
And here are the photos:
Categories: Harrisonburg, JMU, Photography
Gordmans, we hardly knew ye…
10 minute read
May 7, 2021, 10:03 AM
Recently, while working through my very large backlog of photos, I processed the various photos that I took of the Gordmans store in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. For those not familiar, Gordmans, in the form that I experienced it, was an off-price retailer owned by Stage Stores. Stage was in the process of implementing a major strategic move, repositioning itself away from department stores and going all-in on the off-price model (like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, or Ross). With that, the company had begun to convert all of its department store nameplates, i.e. Stage, Bealls, Goody’s, Palais Royal, and Peebles, to Gordmans. The goal was to have all of its 738 stores in 42 states converted to the off-price format under the Gordmans name by the end of 2020. The Waynesboro store was originally a Peebles, and was an early conversion to Gordmans.
As you probably guessed based on my wording, world events caused a change in Stage’s plans. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the various “lockdown” orders issued meant that all of Stage’s stores, considered “non-essential” businesses, were shuttered for several months. With the stores closed and the resulting lack of sales for an extended period, this pushed Stage off of a cliff, financially speaking, which lead to their filing for bankruptcy. It was ultimately determined that the best course of action was to wind-up operations, and as such, when the stores reopened, they immediately began going-out-of-business sales.
My first experience with Gordmans was on June 1, 2020. Elyse and I were out doing some photography in the Hagerstown and Waynesboro areas, and happened upon the Gordmans store in the Wayne Heights Mall shopping center, at an hour when it should have been in operation, if not for government orders requiring that it be closed.
Categories: Companies, COVID-19, Waynesboro (PA)
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:
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.
Schumin Web turns 25…
3 minute read
March 15, 2021, 11:15 PM
March 23, 2021 will mark the 25th anniversary of this website. I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century. If it tells you anything about how long I’ve been doing this, Schumin Web has been around longer than Blogger, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and a whole host of other online properties. And in that time, things here have kind of gone on and on, as we’ve all grown older and matured together.
I suppose that nothing is a better indication of the leng th of time that Schumin Web has been around, and the amount of growth that has occurred during that time than the recent Journal entry about the new scooter. I like to think of that as “Schumin criticizes Schumin,” as I discussed things that I had written in the site’s fifth year in light of more modern developments in the site’s 25th year. The whole thing felt a bit strange, because it felt as though I was criticizing what someone else had written. I know that it was me, because I still remember the events and remember writing that page, but that look back really reminded me of how much I have changed in the past twenty years. My writing style is completely different now compared to then. My writing from back then looks and feels like the work of a much younger man. My attitudes about things are different now, too, as back then, I clearly felt that I was invincible, throwing caution to the wind and riding my scooter on a wheel that I knew was faulty, just because I needed to get two more days out of it, and nothing bad had happened in the past. Nowadays, I would never have done that, because I know that I’m not in invincible, and that getting hurt and not being able to go to work has real-life ramifications that affect more people than just me. All of that said, I’m not the same person that I was back in the early days of this website. That’s not a bad thing by any means, and I like the person that I’ve become.
Meanwhile, I feel like the 25th anniversary of Schumin Web should be a quiet celebration. There is no big compilation photo set celebrating the anniversary waiting in the wings like I did in 2016 with the “Twenty Years” set in Life and Times. Truth be told, the site’s 25th year was a relatively quiet one. This was the first time in the site’s history where no new photo sets were released in the span of a year. The last new photo set to be released was “Planespotting at BWI“, which came out on January 31, 2020 as a 2019 set. I’ve mentioned before that it’s not that I’m not producing new material, but rather, it’s that other projects have hindered my getting things out of the door. There will be 2020 photo sets, but don’t expect them for a while, because they will span longer time periods, and those require more work to assemble than ones that are shot in a single event. Therefore, it makes sense to tackle them along with the backlog of photos from the past year.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Dueling reviews?
2 minute read
March 13, 2021, 8:25 PM
A few weeks ago, Elyse bought some ice cream from H Mart, which is a chain of international grocery stores. One was cheese-flavored, and the other was corn and cheese-flavored. Both of those are flavors that you don’t typically see in regular grocery stores. Elyse had planned to review them on YouTube, and she did so in a live video on Friday night:
Categories: Elyse, Food and drink
Return to the Days Inn…
3 minute read
March 6, 2021, 9:36 AM
About a year ago, Elyse and I visited an abandoned former Days Inn in the Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania area, about twenty minutes south of Breezewood. Since then, we had received reports of a fire at the site in September, which destroyed the motel building. Six months after that fire, we didn’t quite know what the site would look like, i.e. whether the remains would still be there or if it would all be demolished by now, so we went by to check it out.
First thing I did was fly over the site with the drone:
Categories: Breezewood, Urban exploration
Elyse and I got a scooter…
7 minute read
March 2, 2021, 10:00 AM
This past Monday, Elyse and I got a Bird Air scooter. The Bird Air is more or less a consumer version of the Bird scooters that you can rent in various cities. The main difference is that there is no unlocking mechanism, since it’s designed to have one owner, and it also folds up for easy transport. Here it is:
Categories: Elyse, JMU, Recreation/Exercise
Storytelling and the value of context…
5 minute read
February 24, 2021, 6:40 PM
Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about how my photography tends to present itself in the various places that I post my work. This is on the occasion of a nearly yearlong backlog of photography that is sitting in my queue just waiting to be published. In other words, this is why there haven’t been any Photography or Life and Times sets published from 2020 as of yet (they’re coming, I promise). 2020 was a banner year for me as far as photography went, as I was more productive in that year than I have been for the last several years. I’ve just not gotten much of it out the door, with only a relatively small amount’s being published as the photo feature on the front of the website, as well as in the Journal. The rest of it is still waiting to be published.
The reason for the delay in publication is because of a giant Flickr project that I’ve been working on since around April or so. What I want to do is to use my Flickr as my main photo library, i.e. most stuff that I publish goes on Flickr. The ultimate goal with this project was to take everything that I had previously published on Wikimedia Commons and ensure that it was duplicated on my Flickr. I called it “putting Wikimedia Commons behind me”, because I’m essentially moving on from the platform, and making it where I never have to refer back to it again. But I didn’t just do a straight sweep of Flickr and copy it all over. That would be too easy, and if I’m publishing something on a new venue, I want it to look good by my current standards. Thus I go in and locate the original photos in my archive and process them according to my current techniques as if they’re new material. Sometimes the cut is a little different, and sometimes the lighting comes out a little differently than before, but I think that it’s a much better end result. Recall that I did the same thing when I converted Schumin Web to WordPress back in 2011-2012. I went back and reprocessed all of the photos from the originals, and they looked awesome.
This situation was made a tad more complicated by the way I did things back in 2013 when I first started getting serious about my Flickr. In that case, I went through things from the beginning, but I was very conservative about what older material I published to Flickr. I didn’t publish a lot of older material when I did that initial upload. Who knows why. So for this project, I did two waves. The first was a second dive through the archives up to 2013, looking for stuff that was worth publishing as a standalone work. That took several months to do, and resulted in about 17 pages’ worth of new uploads to Flickr. Some of that was stuff that had previously been published other places, and a lot of it was new. I figured that I would catch most of the stuff that was on Wikimedia Commons that way. While I did catch quite a bit of it, I knew that I wouldn’t catch all of it. Thus my second wave was to sweep through my contributions to Commons directly, and catch everything that I’d missed. I figured that I would probably catch about 100 photos and put them up on Flickr. Oh, how wrong I was. When I finished my sweep, I ended up having 528 all together. Made me think of Strong Bad when his computer got a virus, and he said, “That is not a small number! That is a big number!” I located all of them, edited all of them based on my current standards, and now I’m in the process of uploading them all. Thankfully, the process has gone fairly smoothly.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta
I could have told you that was going to happen…
6 minute read
February 14, 2021, 4:48 PM
So the story of former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment has come to an end. And it ended exactly as I predicted, with Trump’s being acquitted by a comfortable margin. While a majority of senators did vote to convict, it did not reach the two-thirds majority (i.e. 67 votes) required to remove. I am always a little bit amused to see people watch the whole process, including the chatter from the various senators involved telling the media how they are going to vote, and then act all surprised when a conviction does not happen. Truth is that a conviction was never going to happen. The Democrats didn’t have enough votes to convict without substantial Republican support, and they knew that going into this.
And to this I say, sometimes, I hate being right. I admit that I was rooting for a conviction on this, even though I knew it didn’t have a snowball’s chance of ever happening (hey, one can hope). But I also stand by what I said in my earlier post that an impeachment was unnecessary. With Trump’s having fewer than two weeks left in his term when the triggering event occurred, it would have made enough sense to just wait it out and let the prosecutors have at him as soon as he left office. As it happened, the entire impeachment charade was a moot point, because Trump was already out of office. The whole thing also showed me that the Democrats under Pelosi seem to be extremely petty, and it has lent some credence to the idea that they were simply out to get Trump, throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. This was their second attempt at removing Trump from office within the span of a year, after all. Practically speaking, you really only get one shot at impeachment, because after that, you start to sound like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, and shoot your own credibility with every subsequent attempt.
In addition, this whole impeachment charade has cost us much in terms of legislative time wasted in both chambers for political games. There are people who are hurting pretty badly right now due to the economic effects of the pandemic, and the time spent impeaching and then trying Trump could have been spent working on economic stimulus packages and other measures to help people survive until things turn around. After all, let’s be honest: politically, Trump is old news. He’s no longer the president, and as such, he is no longer relevant as far as current politics goes, and as such, Congress has more important matters to attend to than to worry about getting revenge on him.
Categories: National politics
Some people just don’t learn…
9 minute read
February 7, 2021, 10:20 PM
Do you remember Marilyn Armstrong, whom I wrote about a few weeks ago regarding a case of copyright infringement? She came back for a second round. Apparently, she found my Journal entry, and just couldn’t leave well enough alone, going on another rant in the comments:
First of all, NO ONE intentionally took anything. This appeared in a pile of pictures listed by Google as “free for public use.” No name or other information was attached. I didn’t write the piece, I didn’t post the picture and if I want a picture, I use my own since I am also a photographer. One of the people who writes on this blog was just looking for a picture of a building with an orange roof and it came up in that Google collection. I don’t know how ANYONE can figure out whose picture it is when there’s no attached information AND it did not come from your site. I already said I was sorry, that it was accidental, unintentional, non-commercial. Beyond that, you really might consider embedding copyright information in your pictures so people have some way of knowing that the picture is NOT — as Google said — free for public use.
Since I didn’t select OR use the picture personally, and since GOOGLE was the organization that pulled it off your blog and stuck it in a pile of “free for public use” pictures, maybe you should consider going after them. Someone ought to, but they have a lot of money and a lot of lawyers and if the U.S. government can’t get them, I’m pretty sure you can’t and I can’t, so they’ll just keep doing what they do and people like me will get blamed for assuming that they aren’t lying.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Some people
So what’s the point of impeaching at this juncture?
4 minute read
January 25, 2021, 9:37 PM
First of all, I am happy to breathe a sigh of relief that Donald Trump is no longer the president. A four-year mistake is over, and the grown-ups are back in charge. I look forward to hearing what happens in the White House now that people who are actually halfway competent at governing are running the show again. I hope that the next four years see the country do exceptionally well, and I hope that the Biden administration succeeds beyond everyone’s wildest dreams.
However, there is one lingering matter remaining from the Trump administration: an impeachment trial. After the whole storming of the Capitol on January 6, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for inciting an insurrection, and that was the status quo when he left office on the 20th. Then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declined to expedite a trial, and so it became the case that Trump’s second impeachment trial would occur after he had already left office. Considering that Trump is now out of office, the only thing that could be accomplished through the impeachment process would be to disqualify him from holding office again in the future, and I really question the necessity of going through an entire impeachment process to accomplish that.
I freely admit that I opposed this impeachment, because impeachment is a process that has only a single sanction, just like the University of Virginia’s honor system: if convicted, you’re removed from office. Therefore, going through the impeachment process feels like a waste of time, since, as we saw, Trump’s term expired before the impeachment process was completed, and therefore, it’s now a moot point. With Trump out of office, nothing changes, regardless of the outcome of the impeachment trial. For what it’s worth, I would have been perfectly content in just ignoring Trump for the final two weeks of his term, and then letting his term expire on January 20. I also am convinced that Trump has trashed whatever credibility that he might have still had with the storming of the Capitol, and I suspect that because of that, most people wouldn’t vote for him for dogcatcher, let alone the President of the United States. Therefore, an impeachment trial of the former president seems like it would prevent us from moving forward and putting the Trump era behind us, at least as far as our politics go.
Categories: National politics