My second experiment with facial hair…
4 minute read
January 5, 2020, 8:53 AM
Friday, January 3 concluded my second experiment in growing facial hair. You may recall my first in October 2009, when I let my whiskers grow during a two-week vacation (16 days’ total growth), and then shaved it off at the end. This time around, Elyse and I made a deal that I wouldn’t shave while I was at home recovering from my recent surgery, with the day of surgery’s being my last shave. The agreement was that I wouldn’t shave again until either I couldn’t stand it anymore, or I went back to work, whichever came first. As it turned out, I was able to go with it for the full period that I was out, which meant that I had 29 days’ worth of facial hair by the time that I shaved. This is what a month’s worth of facial hair growth looks like on me:
Continue reading…Categories: Myself
Christmas in Baltimore…
5 minute read
December 29, 2019, 8:35 AM
So Christmas was pretty fun this year. On Christmas Eve, we had dinner with some of Elyse’s father’s relatives, and then on Christmas Day, we got together with some of Elyse’s mother’s relatives. This was my first holiday with my new, smaller stomach, and so I was still getting used to its new capacity, figuring out how much I should take, what will be tolerated, and so on. I believe that I overdid it by a tad on Christmas Eve, likely by eating foods that I wasn’t ready for yet, but I more or less nailed it on Christmas. When you have a gastric sleeve like I did, you have to chew everything really well, and also not drink and eat at the same time. Generally speaking, you have to give your stomach time to process the food that it just took in before resuming liquid intake. Also, if you put too much in at once, it will get rejected, either by getting sent through to the intestines, or it’s coming back up. But anyway…
After dinner on Christmas, Elyse and I went planespotting near BWI. We had discusssed doing this for some time, even before our planespotting adventure at National, and on this particular occasion, it just worked out. We were already in the Glen Burnie area, I had my real camera with me, and we had about an hour or so of daylight to play with. The location where you typically planespot for BWI is actually specially designated for that purpose: the Thomas A. Dixon, Jr. Aircraft Observation Area. It’s a very nice area that’s operated by Anne Arundel County, with a walking trail, playground equipment for the kids, and plenty of space to watch planes take off and land. On this particular day, planes were landing over the park, and so I got some landing photos. When it comes to planespotting at BWI, it can, for the most part, be summed up in one word: Southwest. BWI is a focus city for Southwest, and as such, sees more Southwest traffic than anything else, and that also means a lot of Boeing 737s.
Categories: Airplanes, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore, Christmas, Howard County, Weight loss
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
I have been sleeved…
4 minute read
December 7, 2019, 7:50 PM
So it’s a done deal. I received a sleeve gastrectomy on December 6 at Montgomery General Hospital. Here I am the following morning:
Categories: Personal health, Weight loss
This should have happened a long time ago…
8 minute read
November 25, 2019, 8:35 AM
Recently, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and there was someone that I didn’t know in my “People You May Know” list who had an emblem for an organization called “Food & Water Workers Union” on their profile photo. This piqued my interest, because as you may know, I used to work for an organization called Food & Water Watch. The similarity in the name made me wonder if it was related, so I looked it up. I figured that it was some branding that my former employer was using for a campaign of some sort on the environmental issue du jour. Imagine my surprise to find out that it was for a recently-formed Food & Water Watch employee union, part of the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union. At the time of this writing, they had voted to unionize, and, according to a tweet, were negotiating over which positions will be represented by the union. I have to say that I’m proud of them for organizing, but I’m also surprised that it took them this long to get to this point. Their becoming a union shop really should have happened a long time ago.
I don’t know what prompted people to organize, but I can only imagine that people finally got fed up with the culture that I left for greener pastures back in 2013. Back then, there was rampant favoritism, little to no room for advancement, no respect for different people’s roles in the organization, and no respect for procedure. There was also the backdoor way that my former boss, Lane Brooks, liked to use to get rid of people, including the finance manager and myself, by creating a new position specifically written to be outside of the targeted employee’s qualifications, and then advertising it out, effectively demoting the employee. If that by itself didn’t make them leave, he would then put the screws on the employee until they quit. And if that didn’t work, he made more overt moves to fire them. After the targeted employee left, the new position was abandoned, having served its purpose in ousting the targeted employee.
Categories: Work
Excited, nervous, and so many other feelings…
5 minute read
November 17, 2019, 9:56 AM
This coming December 6, I will be going in for surgery at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney, where I will be having a sleeve gastrectomy procedure, commonly known as a gastric sleeve. This is a surgery that will help with weight management. This is done laparoscopically, and it removes a portion of the stomach, leaving a much smaller stomach behind that’s roughly the size of a banana. This one only reduces the size of the stomach, and preserves the original path of the digestive tract. Compare to the older Roux-en-Y procedure, which separates the stomach into two sections, and reroutes the digestive tract.
I am doing this because I have been heavy for most of my life (I haven’t seen the underside of 200 since eighth grade), and diet and exercise alone haven’t gotten me nearly as far as I needed to be. Sure, I looked far better at 275 than I did at 384, but it was still too much weight to carry, and I still had weight-related health issues at the lower weight. Over the course of the past year, I have attended classes with a dietitian, had various evaluations and tests done (the endoscopy that I wrote about last April was part of that), and after all of that, the insurance gave the surgery their blessing.
I have to say that I have a bunch of different feelings running through me about this. On one hand, I know that this is a necessary step. My primary care doctor first suggested it to me about a year ago, and then I unexpectedly got a second opinion within a month or so from a specialist that I was seeing when they suggested it as well. As far as I was concerned, that was a pretty strong indicator about what I needed to do, when two out of two doctors, in their professional opinion, suggested it, completely unsolicited. I also feel like I’m ready for it. I know what I’m supposed to do to prepare for the surgery, I know what I’m supposed to do immediately after surgery, and I know what I’m doing during the healing process and thereafter on the maintenance diet. At the end of every dietitian class, they told us “Chew, chew, chew, sip, sip, sip, and walk, walk, walk.” I’ve also stocked up on my multivitamins and my calcium citrate, as gastric sleeve patients will take multivitamins and calcium supplements for life. This also has the potential to get me off of some of the medications that I’m on as well as the CPAP (for sleep apnea). That latter point is exciting, because while I’m used to the CPAP, it’s still a bother, and I would be more than happy to be rid of the device that I’ve described as “the most expensive fan that I’ve ever owned”. I’ve also spoken with colleagues who have had the same surgery, and they have generally had good experiences, which leaves me feeling optimistic. After all, if they can succeed with this while doing very sedentary work, then so can I.
Categories: Personal health, Weight loss
Such an isolating feeling…
4 minute read
November 7, 2019, 11:24 AM
Let me be the first to say that I am glad that the baseball season is finally over. For those not familiar, the Major League Baseball team that is based in Washington, the Nationals, made it to the World Series, and ultimately managed to prevail, with the franchise’s winning the first World Series title in its history, both as the Nationals, as well as the Expos before that.
I don’t know how you’re “supposed to” feel about when the team that’s based in your city is in the championship round, but I felt a bit alienated. I don’t pay much attention to professional sports, other than what I pick up at work (let’s just say that I am well aware of the Redskins–Cowboys rivalry). It just doesn’t interest me. When everyone around me was celebrating the team’s making the World Series and then winning it, I felt bad because I couldn’t muster up the joy myself. It made me feel very isolated, with everyone around me wrapped up in baseball fever, and my feeling incapable of sharing in the hubris.
It really came to the forefront for me when we were all given World Series hats at work, and encouraged, though not required, to wear in place of our our standard uniform hats if we so desired. I was asked to put it on to verify that it fit when it was given to me. It really brought that feeling of emptiness that I felt for professional sports to a head, and that made me feel guilty because I felt nothing over the success of the local professional team while everyone around me was overjoyed. I never did wear the hat beyond the fit test, and after the period that it was authorized for wear expired, I gave it to Elyse. I didn’t want it, but it made her happy. So that’s a win, I suppose. I also suppose that the hat was a moot point to begin with, considering that I haven’t worn a hat to work in more than a year.
Categories: DC area local news, Washington DC
What to do with Columbus Day…
3 minute read
October 29, 2019, 10:25 AM
As the Columbus Day holiday rolled around again this year, we got the usual rounds of people who called the day “Indigenous People’s Day” and denounced Christopher Columbus. This year, the District of Columbia passed short-term legislation declaring the day by the newer name. My feelings on the matter have a surprising amount of nuance to them. But first, let’s make no mistake about it: Christopher Columbus was no saint. From what I’ve read, he enslaved a lot of native people, and killed a whole lot of them as well, both through violence and disease. For those not familiar, the form that this recognition typically takes is that people and organizations eschew the use of the term “Columbus Day”, referring to it as “Indigenous People’s Day” instead.
However, I take issue with the form that this recognition of Columbus’ being less than worthy of the honor of a holiday typically takes. The reason that I don’t like this way of doing things is because it takes the holiday away from one entity and gives it to another entity, treating it as a single either/or issue, rather than treating the declaration of a holiday in honor of an individual or entity as one issue, and treating the removal of a different holiday as its own issue. I also feel that it cheapens the new entity being honored because it makes it seem as though they are a substitute honoree, rather than something worth honoring in their own right. The direct swap also feels too much like overt political correctness, which grates on me. That said, I have no problem with the idea of having an “Indigenous People’s Day” holiday, but doing it as a title swap on the Columbus Day date goes about it all wrong.
I defended my ideas on a recent post on WHSV-TV’s Facebook page (the ABC affiliate from Harrisonburg), on a post running an article about Richmond’s recognizing the holiday under the new name. The comments on WHSV’s Facebook page are typically garbage from very ignorant people, but you do get the occasional intelligent thread in the sea of garbage responses, and this was that latter case.
Categories: Holidays, National politics
Formality, not respect…
4 minute read
October 20, 2019, 9:34 AM
Something has always grated on me when people would say that the use of terms like “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Sir”, “Ma’am”, and so on allegedly indicated respect. It also bothered me that, at least in school, the alleged respect only ran one way. The students were required to address the staff by title and last name, while the teachers generally addressed the students by first name only. It only made sense to me that if using last names meant respect, that it would reciprocate, but it never did. You knew that something was fishy about that, because anyone who’s ever seen a teacher get told off by a student knows that the student will typically use the formal nomenclature for the teacher, but still be rather uncouth. The student won’t say, “The hell with you, Maureen,” but more likely will say, “The hell with you, Ms. Kelly.” The teacher in question might still hustle the student out of the room and fling their stuff out into the hallway so hard that their stuff hits a locker before falling to the floor, but they were respectful, because they addressed the teacher by their title and last name, right? Right? I see you rolling your eyes, because the argument clearly doesn’t hold water. The hypothetical kid in the example was clearly being disrespectful, and what name they actually called the teacher, be it formal or informal, was irrelevant.
Then in 2014, when I began work at my current company, it all became clear during orientation. Use of last names wasn’t about respect at all, but rather, it was about formality. Formality made a whole lot more sense than respect for that type of address. And unlike in school, everyone was on a last name basis with everyone, as in regardless of rank or title, you are on a last name basis with your colleagues. The general rule was title and last name. Operator Schumin. Supervisor Walker. Instructor Jacobs. Superintendent Walkup. And so on. I can respect that, with everyone on a last name basis. We may have different titles and ranks, but everyone is on a last name basis. It’s not a matter of “I’m up here, and you’re down there, and I will address you accordingly,” that you get in school. If schools want to do formal address properly, everyone should be on a last name basis, students and teachers alike. In other words, if the teacher is “Mr. Matherly”, the student should be “Mr. Schumin”. Or if one is going to use position titles, “Teacher Matherly” and “Student Schumin”.
Categories: Language
Changes in the area of photo licensing…
3 minute read
October 1, 2019, 12:00 AM
I have a few changes to announce in the area of photo licensing. First and foremost, Schumin Web Photo Licensing, my in-house photo licensing site, is no more. I had been running that site for about three years, and while it did a respectable amount of business, I felt that it didn’t justify the amount of resources that it consumed, and it also didn’t justify the amount of time spent to maintain it. There was also always a bit of an uncomfortable interaction with Pixsy. The idea was that there was a very real possibility that someone could use my licensing site in an attempt to circumvent a Pixsy case for an unauthorized use of an image, and that could be a sticky situation to get straightened out. Yes, I had policies stating that use of the licensing site to circumvent Pixsy was not permitted, and that any licenses purchased in an attempt to circumvent Pixsy’s process would be cancelled, but good luck trying to prove that. All it really did was make the site look prickly to potential users by having to put that in the fine print, even though its inclusion was necessary. So in the end, the site is gone.
Otherwise, my philosophy for photo licensing is changing based on experience. Licensing on the front end didn’t do as well as I might have hoped, but pursuing Creative Commons violations has been quite lucrative over the last few years. I like to say that Pixsy furnished the house when I moved to Montgomery Village back in 2017. Thus my stance on licensing has evolved from a traditional licensing model towards just letting people use the material under a free license that requires attribution, i.e. Creative Commons, and then aggressively policing compliance through Pixsy and DMCA takedown notices. In other words, follow the rules, and it’s free. Don’t follow the rules, and it’s going to cost you.
The Content Licensing page has also been revised to jive with this new stance on licensing. It now again explicitly states that anything published prior to February 20, 2014 is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. This was always the case due to the way that Creative Commons works in practice, but after February 2014, it was not stated explicitly. Additionally, it directs users to my Flickr page to find Creative Commons content posted after February 20, 2014. Explicitly listing every Creative Commons image on Schumin Web would require going through more than five years’ worth of material to mark stuff, and I can think of a hundred other things that I would rather do besides that. So Flickr it is, especially since that site has very powerful Creative Commons search tools.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Six years, two months, and five days later…
5 minute read
September 24, 2019, 8:26 AM
September 24 marks the day that I have been a former employee of Food & Water Watch for the same amount of time that I had been an active employee there. Since leaving, I have given plenty of thought to my tenure there, and nowadays, I tend to give it a mixed review. On one hand, that job was what got me up to the Washington DC area in the first place, and it was good for me for a period of time. I grew both personally and professionally because of my experience there, and I certainly benefitted from that. I also certainly had lots of good times while there. However, I probably stayed there for much longer than I should have, as most people spent two or three years there and then moved on. I was there for just over six years, was ninth in seniority by the time that I left, and was no longer all that interested in the issues that the organization was working on by the time that I left.
One thing that I have come to realize with the passage of time is that my position ultimately came to its logical conclusion. When I was hired, the organization had about twenty people, with most people based in DC. By the time that I left, the organization was somewhere around 100 people spread across many offices. In my role as office manager, I was that “jack of all trades, master of none” person. I had no direct involvement with the program content, but rather, I was the guy behind the scenes who made sure that the people handling the program content had what they needed to do their thing. I was tasked with fixing stuff, working with outside vendors, making sure that the office had all of the necessary supplies, doing all of the shipping and receiving, handling matters related to the building, and so on. In other words, I served in a very generalist role. I knew a bit about a lot of things, and it suited me well for a time. What happened was that over the years, as the organization grew, they would carve specialist roles out of my responsibilities. It made enough sense, because a bigger organization justified creating more specialized roles. My job gradually evolved over the years as my responsibilities shifted with the growth of the organization. The view of my generalist role also evolved, with the focus of my role’s shifting from the “jack of all trades” part to the “master of none” part, as, with the hiring of more specialized roles, I went from being the guy who knew a lot about a lot of stuff to “what does he know?” And eventually, my role was whittled down to a very low-level role that I was overqualified for, and probably overpaid for as well.
Thinking about the credits music…
5 minute read
September 17, 2019, 9:14 AM
As you well know, I am a big fan of Today’s Special. I certainly know more about the show than most, and have traveled to Toronto to visit a number of different filming locations from the show. And before we get too far along, nerd alert: I’m going deep into the weeds with this one.
There’s one episode, though, where I take issue with the credits. In that instance, I think that the music that they chose to use doesn’t completely fit the mood of the ending. That episode is “Babies“, from 1984. In that episode, we learn that Wanda Willoby, from the Willoby Tale stories, has run away from her home in Possum Ridge and has come to the store, because she feels as though she is being replaced by a new baby that’s on the way. After everyone finds Wanda, they comfort her, and explain to her that her parents won’t love her any less now that there will be a third child in the family. Meanwhile, Wanda, while meaning well, causes a lot of trouble in the store, including accidentally dropping a large display of balls in the Children’s Department, and inadvertently backing into an alarm button in the Computer Room. This underlines the need to get Wanda back home to Possum Ridge as soon as possible. In the end, Wanda realizes that she is not being replaced by the new baby, and the episode ends with the storyteller, a young Lori Chodos (whom you might better remember as Beezus from the 1988 Ramona series), telling everyone how well Wanda handled the new baby after her experience in the store. The episode ends on a high note, though certainly differently than any other episode, since the storyteller had never been integrated into an episode like this before (storytellers typically appeared in standalone segments).
The end credits music used was the slow flute theme, which is the basic melody of the theme on flute with some other accompaniment. This is used on four episodes: “Babies” and “Butterflies” in 1984, and “Wishes” and “Phil’s Visit” in 1986. Of those four episodes, “Butterflies” and “Wishes” have sad endings. “Phil’s Visit” doesn’t have a sad ending per se, but it’s a very emotional episode about alcoholism, and the slow flute ending fits. Out of the four, only “Babies” has a happy ending. “Babies” is also the first episode to use that piece of music. For recurring pieces of music, the first usage is sometimes very different than the other usages. For instance, the music typically used during suspenseful scenes first appears in a relatively lighthearted scene in “Police“, where Sam is attempting to help Officer Hardy look for clues, but ultimately gets in his way. In almost every other instance, the tune is used to help build suspense, such as when a spaceship lands on the roof, or Muffy is rescued after becoming trapped in a utility chase.
Categories: Today's Special
Meet Woomy…
4 minute read
September 8, 2019, 10:09 AM
In going through what I’ve posted, I’ve realized that I’ve mentioned some things but never fully explained them. I typically realize this when these things are slated to appear again or are otherwise planned to be referenced, but discover that there has not been a proper introduction.
In this case, meet Woomy, one of Elyse’s “critters”:
Categories: Elyse, Frederick, Pennsylvania, Travel, Woomy
Of all the words to split hairs over…
6 minute read
August 24, 2019, 9:18 AM
I’ve got one more school story for you. I figure that I’ve told this one so many times to various people that it’s worth putting in Journal entry form and getting “on the record” once and for all. It also demonstrates just how toxic the situation was in 1990 at Bonnie Grimes Elementary School in Rogers.
Fourth grade, as I’ve indicated before, was a pretty rough year. This particular incident occurred in late October. I was in the car rider line after school, waiting for my ride to church for the after-school program that I participated in on Wednesday evenings. The teacher on car duty was Vicki George, the speech therapist, i.e. the person who worked with the kids that had speech impediments. Having no speech impediments myself, I never worked with Mrs. George in an official capacity. My only interactions with her were when she was supervising other kids, i.e. lunch duty, bus duty, car duty, and so on. My interactions with her were generally negative, because she was a real stickler for behavior – more so than the regular teachers – and as such, on several occasions, I got nailed for stuff that I wouldn’t have gotten nailed for by anybody else. I generally tried to avoid her, but sometimes our interactions were inevitable. I don’t remember how I managed to piss her off on this particular occasion in the car line, but somehow, I did, but in any case, it was something really minor (and what I did isn’t relevant to the rest of the discussion). I remember that she told me, “I’m giving you a yellow slip,” i.e. a report about a disciplinary matter, just before my ride showed up and I left.
I thought nothing of it, and the next day, I got a copy of my yellow slip. Okay, then. I didn’t hear anything else about it for a while, so I figured that was the end of it.
Categories: Childhood, Elementary school
Philadelphia? How about New York?
7 minute read
August 18, 2019, 12:55 AM
August 13 was a day of unexpected twists and turns, for sure. What was supposed to be a trip to Philadelphia with friends ended up turning into a trip to New York City for Elyse and me. As originally planned, we were going to meet up with Brian, Trent, and a few other folks from the DC area who were traveling up separately at 30th Street Station, and the bunch of them plus Elyse were going to go fan transit for a while, while I did my own thing, mostly photographing in and around Center City. That didn’t happen.
What caused our plans to change was twofold. First, the weather forecast called for storms all up and down the east coast. So I would have to figure out something else to do, as I would be rained out. Secondly, we were running a tad late due to traffic around Baltimore that led us to take a more southerly route before resuming our planned route. Once we got up there, the plan was to park in New Jersey and then ride PATCO into the city. What happened, though, was that the other group didn’t want to wait for us at 30th Street Station, and so they went and continued with their plan without Elyse, and took SEPTA Regional Rail out to Norristown, with the idea that we would catch up with them later. We learned this while we were on PATCO riding into the city. So essentially, they ditched us. We did not take too kindly to this, and so rather than chase them in an effort to catch up with them, when it was pretty clear that we were not a priority (otherwise, they would have waited for us), we did our own thing instead.
We ended up getting off of PATCO at City Hall station in Camden. There, we walked over to the Walter Rand Transportation Center station for the River Line. Neither of us had ever ridden the River Line, so this would be a new experience. We were surprised that there was very little transit-oriented development around the River Line stations. Much of what was right around the stations that we could see was older construction that predated the service.
Categories: New Jersey, New York City, New York Subway, NJ Transit, PATCO, Philadelphia, SEPTA