One of my best years in school…
50 minute read
June 21, 2024, 1:00 PM
Out of all of the school experiences that I’ve discussed in the past, I recently realized while I was out operating the train that I’ve never said a whole lot about sixth grade. That year is a tie with eighth grade for my best year in school, because for the most part, everything that year just worked out really well. It was a year where I learned a lot in new surroundings, and I had a lot of great new experiences.
Sixth grade came on the heels of my absolute worst year in school, i.e. fifth grade. I’ve written about that experience in some detail not once, but twice, but to put it simply, it was an extremely toxic environment where the school was actively working against us, and which we had determined would not get better no matter what we did. Additionally, sixth grade was still part of elementary school in Rogers at that time, so if we had remained, we would have been right back at the same toxic school environment for another year, which have been far less than ideal. I admit that I was a bit wary about wanting to deal with school again, but of course, it wasn’t like dropping out and doing something else was an option. I was absolutely delighted to learn that in my new school district, sixth grade was part of middle school, and not the final year of elementary school. By fifth grade, it was clear that I had outgrown the elementary school format, so moving up to the next tier made enough sense. I was ready to do something new, and I was up for the challenge. It was the perfect stage for a fantastic rebound year after the previous disaster of a year.
On the day that we arrived in Stuarts Draft, we took care of school matters for both my sister and me. She would be starting second grade at Stuarts Draft Elementary School, and I would be starting sixth grade at Stuarts Draft Middle School. And there was another twist: sixth grade orientation was that same night. We all were like, guess we know what we’re doing tonight.
Continue reading…Categories: Fire drills, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
A weekend loop trip…
22 minute read
June 12, 2024, 8:24 AM
From May 30 to June 1, I took a trip down to the Hampton Roads area in Virginia. Hampton Roads is by no means an unfamiliar place, even though I don’t get to go there nearly as much as I would otherwise like, but the way I got down there was a bit unconventional. Instead of going down the west side of the Beltway to I-95 in Springfield heading towards Richmond and then hanging a left on I-64 to go through New Kent, Williamsburg, and the like to get to my hotel in Newport News, I instead went down the east side of the Beltway to New Carrollton, where I got on Route 50 and took that over the Bay Bridge and then continued as far as Salisbury, where I made a right turn at US 13 to head down into Virginia towards the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. From there, I headed through Norfolk, through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, through Hampton, and finally to my hotel in Newport News. I was also doing this trip completely unsupervised, as Elyse was going to a bus event up in Hershey that same weekend.
I made a few stops along the way, mostly to do some photography with the drone. My first stop was at a large park on the east side of the Bay Bridge, where I was planning to get some shots of the bridge itself:
Categories: Friends, Hampton Roads, Maryland, Photography, Roads, Today's Special
Raise a glass for ICQ…
8 minute read
May 24, 2024, 5:32 PM
Categories: Netculture, Schumin Web meta
A proper visit to Charleston…
28 minute read
May 9, 2024, 10:14 AM
From April 17-19, Elyse and I made a weekend trip down to Charleston, South Carolina. It’s funny how this worked out. After our visit to Charleston last October, we both were left wanting more. We saw lots of potential in Charleston, and wanted to go back, but we weren’t sure whether we wanted to drive back again, vs. flying. Charleston is eight hours away, which is quite a long haul, and it’s almost entirely through rural areas once you get out of the DC region. In other words, not very exciting. But then when we looked at airfare, we realized that it was really expensive, and that with all of the goings-on at the airport plus multiple flights, we wouldn’t save any time compared to driving, plus we would be limited as to what we could bring with us, and would probably need to rent a car down there. All of that said, that pushed me into driving territory, because then we could bring whatever we wanted, go on our own schedule, and have fun on the way down and back. Plus then we would have the HR-V in Charleston.
On the southbound leg, I tried to keep the trip as close to all-business as I could. I only planned on making four stops: one in the Richmond area, one in Skippers, Virginia (the last Virginia exit on I-95), one somewhere in North Carolina, and then one at the Buc-ee’s in Florence, South Carolina. That would get us to Charleston at a somewhat reasonable hour as long as we kept to it.
Richmond was intended primarily as a food stop. My original idea was to stop at the Sheetz at the Atlee exit, and do Sheetz, and I pitched that to Elyse a few days prior to our trip. It’s funny – when I pitched the idea, Elyse’s response was something to the effect of, “When were you going to tell me about this?” and my response was simply, “What does this look like?” Elyse said that she didn’t want to do Sheetz, because we always do Sheetz, and then suggested we find a barbecue place. I was like, “You had me at barbecue.” Looking it up, I found two places that weren’t too far off of I-95. One was a place called Q Barbeque up in Glen Allen, and then the other one was Oak & Apple right in downtown. I chose Oak & Apple, because it was right in downtown Richmond, and closer to the freeway. More or less get off of the exit, go like two blocks, and boom, there it is.
Categories: Converted buildings, Fire alarms, Netculture, New Flyer D35HF, North Carolina, Photography, Retail, Roads, Ships, South Carolina, Transit, Travel
Where does it go from punishment to exploitation?
8 minute read
May 1, 2024, 9:36 AM
Recently, this post by Nadia Ware came up on my news feed in a Staunton group that I’m in:
Categories: Social media, Staunton
A trip across South Jersey…
16 minute read
April 27, 2024, 9:41 AM
On April 4-5, I went on a solo trip up to New Jersey. It was a trip that I had been looking for a time to do and one that Elyse had no interest in. April 4-5 was where it fit in my schedule, so I planned it out and went. That said, I was certainly crossing my fingers and anything else that I could cross that the weather would hold out. The forecast for my travel dates would be mostly cloudy and rainy, with a possibility for some breaks in the cloud cover and precipitation. I wanted a very productive overnight trip where I came back with a nice, big photo take, and not a trip that got rained out and ended up being a scouting-future-locations kind of trip. That’s the thing about overnight trips and such: they’re planned and booked in advance, so the weather can be a bit of a roll of the dice. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you don’t.
The plan was to go up to New Jersey via I-95 (i.e. my usual route) and then go across South Jersey on the first day, ending up in Egg Harbor Township for the night. Then I was going to go down to Cape May and take the ferry across to Delaware on the second day, returning home via US 50. Elyse and I tend to call this sort of trip profile a “loop trip”, since we are more or less constantly covering new ground, and doing almost no backtracking. These sorts of trips are fun when they work out, since it eliminates the return-trip blahs, where it’s clear that the fun is largely over, and we’re just retracing our steps back home. On a loop trip, almost no road is traveled on twice.
This one was a little unusual in that I had a doctor’s appointment at the hospital in Olney first thing, so I attended to that and then left straight from the hospital. However, the ride up didn’t exactly inspire confidence in my ability to have the productive trip that I wanted, since it was raining more or less the entire way up to New Jersey. My first planned photo stop was the Church Landing Fishing Spot in Pennsville Township, where I planned to try some different angles of the Delaware Memorial Bridge with the drone, but due to bad weather, I skipped it. I’m not worried about it, though, because we visited this area once before in 2022, and I don’t expect that it’s going anywhere any time soon, i.e. I can do that on a future visit. Fortunately, the rain stopped not long after I got into New Jersey, though the cloud cover would persist for most of the day.
Categories: Delaware, Family, New Jersey, Ocean City, Photography, Ships, Travel
“Autism acceptance” means all autistic people…
9 minute read
April 23, 2024, 10:20 AM
For those not aware, April has been designated as Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month. I tend to fall more on the “acceptance” side of things, since it’s not so much about making people aware about autism and autistic people as it is to accept us for who we are, and for them to not infantilize or otherwise behave patronizingly towards us. I also feel as though there are a lot of misconceptions about autism, and the activities that various organizations have put on in recognition of autism have not done anything to help dispel these misconceptions. The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that the focus is often entirely on children, which makes me think that too many people seem to believe that autism is something that just affects children, and that it’s not something that adults also deal with. In other words, autistic children are all well and good and all, but they eventually grow up to become autistic adults. Autism is not something that you outgrow as you get older. You don’t just stop being autistic once you reach adulthood. Autistic people may become very adept at hiding it, also known as “masking”, as they get older, but beneath it all, they’re still autistic.
That said, I take great issue with people’s focusing solely on children when discussing autism, because it is a lifelong condition. In my case, I am very high-functioning, and so while growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, my autism went undiagnosed. That meant that I got no autism-specific support as a child and as a teen. That’s not the fault of anything specific to my situation, though, since autism wasn’t as well understood back then, and high-functioning cases like mine weren’t typically diagnosed. I admit that I have mixed feelings on that, as I’ve heard about some of the interventions and other alleged “help” for autistic people at the time. So while it might have been helpful for me to have had some autism-related support, remembering the ham-handed way that the school tried to address my toe walking when I was in kindergarten, I don’t necessarily know if I would trust them to help me out with that.
A very transit-themed weekend…
14 minute read
April 11, 2024, 11:57 PM
On March 28 and 29, I had two very distinct transit-themed adventures. One day was a bus adventure, and the other was rail-related.
The bus adventure came first, on Thursday, March 28. That one has some background to it. First of all, every year for the past several years, I have had what I call a “tax party” with my friend Matthew, where we get together and we take care of our various taxes. Generally speaking, we go somewhere to eat, and then I sit down with the computer and do my own taxes, I do Matthew’s taxes, and I do Elyse’s taxes. This year, the tax party was done in two stages, as Matthew had to cancel at the last minute due to something unforeseen coming up, so I did the taxes for Elyse and me on the original date back in February (where I owed a ton of money because of my photography earnings), and then rescheduled with Matthew for a later date, impressing on him that he really shouldn’t postpone again, since the due date for taxes is a hard date, and you really don’t want to be a last-minute filer if you can avoid it. So we planned the date, and that was that. Now Matthew is also a bit of a transit enthusiast, and has pursued some opportunities in the transit field, but has always gotten cold feet when it came to the thought of actually operating a bus.
Now, along with Elyse, I am also on the board of directors for Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum based in Roanoke, Virginia. Many of us on the board are in the DC area, and some of our vehicles do stay up in the DC area for various reasons. So I pitched the idea to have a small outreach event, taking a bus out for a spin and going to visit Matthew in that. So Elyse and I went down to where the bus was kept, parked the HR-V, and took out the bus. The bus that we had was former Fairfax Connector bus 7754, a 1991 Orion I, which we tend to call MATT, which stands for “Mobile Accessible Travel Training”. As I understand it, this bus originally operated as a regular Fairfax bus, and then was converted to a training vehicle to help older adults and people with disabilities learn to use public transit. I’m not exactly sure how it all worked, but it was fitted with some extra doodads like TV monitors, and has a desk with a swivel seat in the back of it, while the area forward of the rear door has updated seats.
Categories: Alexandria, Driving, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Matthew, Transit, Washington DC, WMATA
Adventures in the mountains…
21 minute read
April 6, 2024, 6:38 PM
From March 20-22, Elyse and I made our quarterly weekend trip down to Staunton. This was one where the planning was kind of light. We planned the dates and booked the room well in advance (vacation at my work is scheduled all at once for the year in June), but the planning for the actual adveture was a little light. So we just kind of played it by ear. It turned out to be pretty fun, with a few hard want-to-see things, and a lot of happy surprises in between. This trip started out somewhat unconventionally, though. Elyse got an early start in order to see the “Fleet of the Future” event that Metro was running down on the mall, so she left early and took the train down to see that (I went the following week, so stay tuned for my reportback there). I then left at my intended time, and scooped her from Vienna. Once I got Elyse, we were on our way again, heading down I-66 to I-81. The plan for the trip down was to stop in Middletown, where there was a place called Shaffer’s BBQ. We stopped in there for lunch on the September trip, and enjoyed it so much that we went again this time. Then our next stop was going to be Harrisonburg, because Elyse wanted to eat at D-Hall.
When we got off I-66 and onto I-81, though, we immediately noticed that the air was really smoky. We didn’t know what was going on, so we made our planned stop at Shaffer’s and did some research online. I ended up making a Reddit post while I was at Shaffer’s to see what I could find out. Reddit is pretty useful for that, throwing a question out there and then seeing what you get back. Consensus was that there were a bunch of wildfires burning in the state because of dry and windy weather, and that what we saw was most likely wildfire smoke. Okay.
Then after we finished at Shaffer’s, we continued on our trip south, taking US 11 to avoid an issue near exit 291 on I-81. While we were going down the road, Elyse spotted the source of the smoke: a large wildfire to our west. Okay, then. We pulled over and strategized a little bit, looking at Google Maps and figuring out how to tackle this. We ended up playing it by ear, taking various back roads while keeping an eye on our target and navigating closer to it. We pulled over at one point to get our bearings after going for a while without seeing the fire. There, we sent the drone up and verified where it was relative to our location.
Categories: Augusta County, Harrisonburg, JMU, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Travel, Virginia, Walmart
No, I do not have to get anyone’s permission for that…
11 minute read
March 30, 2024, 1:35 PM
It has always amused me about how often people play the permission-of-the-subject card with me. Usually, it comes from someone who is a bit salty about coverage of their activities that may portray them in a negative light. However, recently, someone played this card on a post that I made on Schumin Web‘s Facebook page in regards to a wildfire in Virginia that I recently photographed with my drone. The post was about a photo that depicted a house burning to the ground that I am planning to run as part of a Journal entry about a weekend trip that Elyse and I had recently made:
Categories: High school, Middle school, Montgomery Village, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Social media
How’s that for gratitude…
11 minute read
March 19, 2024, 9:23 AM
Some people, I just don’t understand. I had been involved in a Facebook group called “You know you’re from Gaithersburg, Maryland if”. The group’s purpose was to share nostalgic content about Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is the town right next to Montgomery Village, where I live. However, the group had extremely lax moderation, and by “extremely lax”, I mean “none”, as there was no one keeping an eye on things to make sure that good posts were getting through and off-topic or spam posts were being removed. As a result, most of the group’s content consisted of advertisements for moving companies, air duct cleaning, gutter replacement, furniture cleaning, carpet cleaning, and car detailing. In other words, it was spam city. The only reason that I stayed in the group was to maybe get a piece of historic Gaithersburg content. After all, I was in the group in the first place because I was interested in getting a bit of local history from the perspective of locals. I’ve only been familiar with Gaithersburg since 2007, and have only lived in the Gaithersburg area since 2017. So as far local history goes, I’ve only been around to witness a small slice of it. I rely on other people to provide the rest.
Then one day this past December, while Elyse and I were out having lunch, I got a notification from Facebook saying that they wanted to promote me to admin of this group because the group had no active admins. In other words, what I had suspected was true: the existing group admins had taken a permanent lunch break, so Facebook picked someone from amongst the membership to run the group. I just had to tap “accept” on my phone, and they handed me the keys to the castle. All of a sudden, I was in charge of a group in which I had been a somewhat passive participant for several years.
Categories: Gaithersburg, Social media, Some people
Fire at the quarry…
4 minute read
March 14, 2024, 8:38 PM
Sometimes, you just have to be at the right place at the right time. I had a doctor’s appointment today near Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, but before I left, Elyse gave me a heads-up that there was a fire at the Aggregate Industries quarry off of Piney Meetinghouse Road. Funny thing about this: I discovered that quarry about a month ago on Maps, and added it to my photo list, which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” because of how infrequently I cross things off of it. So this worked out nicely, because I already knew exactly where the location was, and I would already be nearby. So I threw the drone in the back of the car and made plans to check out the quarry after my appointment. As I approached Interstate 270, the smoke became quite evident, with a large plume of smoke visible in the distance. After the appointment, I headed over, and found a safe place to fly that was out of the way, but where I could still see everything that I needed to see in order to fly safely.
Being a working fire situation, I kept my distance. I did not want to interfere with the firefighting efforts in any way, and truth be told, I didn’t want to be noticed at all. I just wanted to get in, get my shots, and then get out. I knew the kind of stuff that I would capture and how I would fly if I was flying under normal conditions, but this was not that, and so I adjusted accordingly.
According to news sources, the fire involved two liquid asphalt tanks, one tank containing used motor oil, and various other miscellaneous equipment owned by the F.O. Day Bituminous Company, which has facilities on the site. Due to its being an oil fire, they couldn’t use water on the flames, so they had to get a foam unit to come out from Dulles Airport to help extinguish the fire. The fire was completely out by the evening. Fortunately, everyone on site was safely evacuated, and no one was hurt. There was also no danger to the public or the surrounding area, and a fire department spokesman likened the smoke to a bad air quality day. So at the end of the day, it was only property damage, i.e. nothing that money can’t fix.
Categories: DC area local news, Montgomery County, Photography
Thinking about various church experiences…
22 minute read
March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM
Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school. It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?” My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around. In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later). But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were. Some experiences were quite good, while some them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.
For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003. I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it. My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion. Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989. Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light. I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack. Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic. When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age. Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.
Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked. As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time. By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more. We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.
Categories: Arkansas, Reddit, Religion, Stuarts Draft
The most pointless school day ever…
7 minute read
February 17, 2024, 8:03 PM
This year marks thirty years since the most pointless day of my entire school career. It was the only day that I attended where, if I were to do it all over again, I am 100% certain that I would have skipped it. That was the day that Augusta County decided to have a snow make-up day on a Saturday. Yes, you read that right: they had school on a Saturday.
I suppose that the lead-up to this made enough sense, because in Augusta County, the winter of 1994 was a very snowy one. School was cancelled for a total of 16 days over the course of that winter for various weather events, including one instance where we were out for the entire week. The thing about Augusta County, though, is that the schools use one calendar across the entire county, but being such a large county (only Pittsylvania is larger), the conditions end up being very different in various parts of the county. So if road conditions would be too treacherous for students in the more rural western part of the county to go to school, they would call a snow day. Thus, students in the more urbanized eastern part of the county (where I lived) would also get the day off, but our roads, being more heavily traveled, would typically be fine. So with 16 snow days, three were built into the calendar, i.e. they made the school year 183 days long, assuming that we would have at least three snow days, i.e. those snow days were essentially freebies because the calendar already accounted for them. That in itself was a first for Augusta County, as the previous year had no built-in snow days at all, therefore all of the snow days that we had that year had to be made up. For a region that is north enough to get a lot of snow but south enough to where people still freak out over it, it’s surprising that they didn’t build in snow days before 1993, especially considering that the previous year had 14 snow days (why do I still remember this?). So accounting for the three built-in days, that meant that we had to make up 13 days.
The way that Augusta County allocated make-up days was something that I disagreed with. They generally preferred to use existing time off within the year for make-up days before extending the year out into June. While they would add some days at the end of the year before some holidays, they only were in the make-up day plan after one or two other school holidays, conference days, teacher workdays, etc. had already been taken away. So having 16 snow days, we were going to school five days a week from the last snow event in March all the way to June 17, with no breaks of any kind, as every single teacher workday, parent-teacher conference day, and long holiday weekend had been commandeered for instruction. I would have preferred to just tack every single make-up day onto the end of the year in June and leave the breaks intact, because I felt like those off days had value because they prevented burnout all around (and trust me, the burnout was heavy that year, and was exacerbated by jackoffs like Frank Wade, who were more than happy to remind us that we had our Memorial Day holiday back in January). And really, with the schools’ being out for more than two months in the summer already, it’s not like anyone would really notice an extra week. If they had extended it out to June 24 or beyond, I doubt anyone would have cared much, except maybe those families who planned big vacations immediately after school let out (and they should know that the end date for the school year is really not set in stone until spring).
Categories: Augusta County, Middle school
Some spherical images of a dead mall…
6 minute read
February 12, 2024, 11:10 AM
Do you remember when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall back in 2015? I wrote about it in the second part of the “Everything Else” photo set, but what I didn’t show you, mainly because I lacked the capability to display it properly at the time, was that I also shot some spherical photos of the place. I was glad that I did, too, because the management would close the interior of the mall less than two weeks after our visit, and the mall was demolished about a year later in preparation for redevelopment. The property now contains an outdoor shopping center called Mill Station, and from everything that I can tell, the center is now thriving. I suppose that tells you that the mall itself was the problem, and that the area is, in fact, a good location for retail – just not that retail, apparently. It’s also spurred additional development beyond the old mall property, so clearly, things are going well there.
So as far as the spherical panorama images go, when we were exploring the mall, I used the Google camera app, which could shoot spherical panoramas, and took eight photo spheres of the place. You start in one spot, and then it tells you how to move the camera in order to image the entire thing. The result is essentially a single Google Street View image of wherever you are standing. I first learned how to do this in August 2014, and I did it on and off for about a year. I eventually lost interest in the photo spheres, after Google discontinued the Panoramio service and rolled it all into Google Maps. As is typical when Google rolls an existing service into another, much functionality was lost, and Panoramio’s going into Maps was no exception. The way that they wanted you to shoot photo spheres after that was with a separate Street View app, and it would more or less upload directly to Google Street View, and wouldn’t save as an image file of mine. So that was a bit of a deal-breaker for me. As far as this website goes, I couldn’t get the images to display properly on here natively, and really didn’t want to have any additional plugins for the site just to power a single Journal entry. Then I recently discovered that Flickr will embed these things on third party websites, such as this one, and we were in business.
Categories: Baltimore County, Photography, Retail