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6 minute read

May 4, 2023, 9:38 PM

It’s funny how things work sometimes.  For 22 years, I had one pair of glasses and wore that pair every day.  The glasses varied over the years, going from nearly round in 2001, and slowly becoming more and more square as I upgraded in 2005, 2008, and 2010.  Then in 2016, I switched from wire rims to plastic.  But even with that change, I still only had one pair with my current prescription, and kept old pairs as spares.  I mean, glasses were expensive, ya know?

Then a couple of things happened.  First, I discovered Zenni Optical, after Elyse got an extra pair of glasses from them that were branded by FaZe Clan.  This ensured that she would have an extra pair after she had her own glasses emergency when were on a trip back in 2021 (her old glasses came apart in a way that wasn’t fixable while we were outbound), and it also meant that she could now rotate between pairs.

Then, last October, my glasses were destroyed by the airbag when the original HR-V got totaled back in October.  The following day, I practically turned the house upside down looking for my old pairs of glasses, and I couldn’t find any of them.  I don’t know what happened to them, but they were nowhere to be found.  Go figure.  The day after that, I went and got new glasses made at LensCrafters, so that I would be back in business on that front, getting an updated prescription for glasses with a slightly updated design.  I initially got single vision lenses in order to have glasses in an hour, since I was going on that trip to Tennessee, and needed to be able to see right away.

After we got back from Tennessee, I got the lenses upgraded to progressives, because that’s what you have to do when you’re mature like me.  When I was talking to the guy at LensCrafters to get measured for progressives, I made sure to get the pupillary distance from him, so that I could “get a cheap spare pair on Zenni”.  He gladly gave it to me and explained how it needed to be entered in.  Cool.  I ordered the progressive lenses for the glasses that I already had from LensCrafters, and then I ordered a spare pair later from Zenni, in blue.  The Zenni glasses showed up first, before the new lenses from LensCrafters did, so I set the Zenni glasses aside, since the idea was that this was a spare pair, and I didn’t want to get used to progressives on a cheap pair, when my LensCrafters glasses cost me several hundred dollars (under the assumption that “more expensive” means “better”).

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Categories: Glasses

32 minute read

April 26, 2023, 8:33 PM

From April 12-14, Elyse and I took a little weekend trip to New York City.  This was the new HR-V’s first road trip, and what better place to go to than New York, I suppose.  It was definitely a different experience than the Soul’s first road trip, which was the trip home from Staunton the day after I bought it, as well as the original HR-V’s first road trip, which was a day trip to Philadelphia.

With this trip, I was looking forward to seeing how the new HR-V did on a long trip with the various smart features that it has built into it, such as the adaptive cruise control and the lane watch system.  I had tested these things on my commutes to and from work on various occasions on a somewhat limited basis, but I hadn’t done a long drive with them yet.  The good news was that these systems worked quite well together on our trip, which we took largely via I-95 and the New Jersey Turnpike.  I think that this was probably the least stressful drive on I-95 that I’ve ever had, as the cruise control maintained a safe distance from the cars ahead of me, and it maintained my lane quite well, following the various curves in the road.  That put me, as the driver, in something of a more “strategic” role, as I was responsible for navigating and making lane changes and such, as well as watching out for any hazards, but the car largely drove itself.  I wouldn’t use these systems on city streets, but for a road trip on freeways, it was great.  The thing to remember, though, is that these are driver assist features.  This is not self-driving, and should not be confused with that.  This does not absolve the driver from the responsibility of driving at the proper speed for conditions, and it also does not mean that you can kick back and play on your phone behind the wheel.  Not at all – you’re still very much in charge, even if this does automate certain parts of it.

The trip up was fairly uneventful.  We had to detour onto Route 1 from White Marsh to Joppa in order to avoid a backup, and there was a construction project on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which had a direct connection to the Turnpike that crossed us over to the southbound span.  Additionally, Maryland House, one of the two full-service travel plazas on I-95 in Maryland, was closed for emergency plumbing repairs.  And then, of course, when driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, the speed limit signs are merely suggestions.  Just keep up with traffic, and you will be fine.  And if traffic is going 20 over the speed limit in a work zone, you’re going 20 over in a work zone, too.  Otherwise, you become a hazard to traffic.  Then upon arrival in the New York area, we got on I-278, where we followed roughly the same route that we did in our impromptu 2017 trip to New York, but in reverse.  We parked on the street in front of our hotel, the Aloft, got checked in and brought all of our stuff up, and then I took the HR-V to its own hotel, which was on the next block over.

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Categories: Driving, Family, Honda HR-V (2023), New York City, New York Subway, Photography, Travel

8 minute read

April 19, 2023, 4:55 PM

I’ve mentioned before that working on the train allows me a lot of time alone with my thoughts.  Sometimes that leads to my working through some of my problems and coming up with some solutions, sometimes I am mentally writing out Journal entries, sometimes it just replays traumatic experiences over and over again (though writing that letter and then mailing it to the other driver really helped me make peace with things, i.e. mentally, I think I’m going to be okay), but sometimes, I’m just doing things in my head like figuring out how many presidents have unique first names as far as the list of presidents goes, or doing math of some sort.

Funny thing about math.  Growing up, I always thought that I was bad at math.  I always tended to struggle in math in school, and looking back, I don’t quite understand why, because as an adult, I’m pretty sharp with math.  Give me a calculator, and I can solve just about anything.  I’m inclined to blame the various teaching methods used for my math struggles growing up, since it wasn’t until college, when I had Dr. Ed Parker at JMU in a summer math class to satisfy my degree requirements, when he taught us algebra in a way that made things finally fall into place.  In other words, the way that we teach math kind of sucks.  I also realized that I just plain don’t like division.  I find it overly complicated.  Flip it around and express it as multiplication, though, and I’m fine – then it all makes sense to me.  Similarly, I am never doing long division by hand ever again.  It’s too complicated, and besides, it’s not like I don’t always have a device with a calculator on it with me all the time these days.  This, of course, is contrary to what the teachers always said growing up, i.e. that we wouldn’t have a calculator with us all the time.  Clearly, these teachers never anticipated smartphones in the nineties.  It’s an even stranger statement considering that calculator watches already existed at that time, even if they were not the most common of things, meaning that some people already did have a calculator on them at all times, strapped to their wrist.

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Categories: Myself, School

15 minute read

April 7, 2023, 10:00 AM

Recently, I was finally able to complete the last little bits of business related to the car accident from last October, and put it all behind me.  On Thursday, March 30, I made the 175-mile journey to Stuarts Draft in the Scion – a trip that would leave it back home with my parents, where it belongs.  And while I was at it, I made a weekend trip out of it, coupling it with a day in Richmond, where I did some photography.  As such, I would traverse what I like to call Virginia’s “Interstate square”.  If you look at a map of Virginia, the various Interstate highways in the state form something like a lopsided square, consisting of I-66 to the north, I-81 to the west, I-64 to the south, and I-95 to the east, and Strasburg, the DC area, Richmond, and Staunton at the corners:

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Categories: Driving, Family, Harrisonburg, Howard Johnson's, JMU, Photography, Richmond, Roads, Scion xB, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Travel

10 minute read

March 24, 2023, 6:33 PM

All I have to say is, thank goodness.  Five and a half months after my original Honda HR-V was totaled in an accident, and on the 27th anniversary of this website’s founding, I am at last back in an HR-V.  It was a much longer journey than anyone expected, but we got there.  The thing about buying a new car right now is that because of a semiconductor shortage, the demand for cars far outstrips the supply, and most new cars are already spoken for before they’re even manufactured.  As such, right now, you can’t just buy a new car off of the lot and then drive it home.  Rather, you’ve got to get into the queue, and your car will be built and delivered in a few months’ time.

The biggest take-home for me in the whole process was learning a lot about how cars get to dealerships.  Going into this, I thought that the customer ordered the car that they wanted, the dealership placed that order with the manufacturer, and then the manufacturer would build it and ship it to the dealership, where the customer would be waiting.  Turns out that’s not how it works.  How it actually works is that the manufacturer makes whatever they want, and then they allocate a certain number of cars to each dealership.  Then the dealerships either sell those cars themselves, or trade them amongst each other to meet customer needs.  I suspect that my lack of understanding of how this worked led to some delay, as I inadvertently sent my contact at Shockley Honda on a wild goose chase with a very specific request that made it harder to get me a car.

But before I got to that point, I had to make sure that another HR-V was what I wanted for my next car.  That wasn’t as straightforward as one might think, because Honda had redesigned the HR-V for 2023.  Therefore, it wouldn’t be the same HR-V as I had just lost.  The HR-V had gotten a platform change, now sharing a platform with the Civic rather than the Fit.  It was also a bigger vehicle than it used to be.  On October 10, a day or so after the accident, after getting my new glasses and speaking with many different people from the insurance company, I was heading home after dropping Elyse off with a friend for a little while.  My route took me past Herson’s Honda in Rockville, and I glanced over at the lot to see what they had.  To my surprise, there was a 2023 HR-V sitting on their lot.  Time to act: I busted a move across a couple of lanes of traffic to get in there to see about taking that HR-V for a test drive.  I talked to the salesman, and he showed me everything on it, and we took it for a spin around Rockville, over various kinds of roads so that I could get a good feel for how it handled.  It all felt very familiar.  In other words, while it may have looked different and it had a lot of fancy new features, it was still an HR-V under all of that.  Then the next day, I took Elyse with me to the dealership and we gave it another test drive.  Funny thing was that neither the second salesman nor Elyse noticed that I never set the mirrors, the seat, or anything when I got into it.  I just jumped in and we were off, because it was all still set for me from the day before.  That second test drive validated my findings from the first drive, and I also asked a few questions that I had forgotten to ask the day before.  So it was settled: my next car would be another HR-V.  And in what felt like a surprising move, I went with the EX-L trim, i.e. the top-tier version.  Reason was that on the 2023 models, EX-L was the only trim that had a moon roof.  The sport trim didn’t have a moon roof anymore.

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Categories: Frederick, Honda HR-V (2023)

5 minute read

March 20, 2023, 8:38 PM

From March 15-17, Elyse and I did another trip down to Augusta County, and we had a good time overall.  This was typical for these sorts of trips, in that we stayed at Hotel 24 South in Staunton, did stuff, and also visited my parents.  This was supposed to have been the trip where my parents’ Scion xB, which I’ve been driving since late October, went back to my parents to stay, but due to a delay in my new car’s arrival, it ended up being a pretty conventional trip.

On the middle day of our trip, we got together with our friends Evan and Andrew, and we visited the Blue Ridge Tunnel.  For those not familiar, the Blue Ridge Tunnel is a former railroad tunnel that was built in 1858, and was used by various railroads until 1944, when the tunnel was abandoned in favor of a new tunnel constructed nearby, which is still used by railroads today.  I had first learned about the Blue Ridge Tunnel when I was in high school, but while I knew that it existed as an abandoned tunnel, I never knew exactly where it was.  Otherwise, I probably would have sought it out and explored it.  In late 2020, the tunnel reopened as a rail trail, and the public was invited to hike the tunnel.  Elyse and I had it on our list of things that we wanted to do, and since our friends wanted to do it, this seemed like a perfect opportunity.  We all parked at the east trailhead, which is off of Route 6 on the Nelson County side of the mountain.  I got my DSLR and my tripod, and we were off.  We all hiked out to the tunnel together, but then when we got to the tunnel, Elyse, Evan, and Andrew hiked it more or less straight through, while I used the tripod with my DSLR to get some photos of the tunnel itself.

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Categories: Afton Mountain, Friends, Travel

28 minute read

March 10, 2023, 4:21 PM

You all have probably heard about the artificial intelligence tools that can write articles and such that have been taking the Internet by storm lately.  One such service is ChatGPT, which is a chatbot by a company called OpenAI, which can answer your questions about various subjects.  I asked the service about myself and about Schumin Web, because (A) my name is unique, and (B) Schumin Web is also unique, and (C) I’ve been around on the Internet long enough that I figure that it should know who I am.  Additionally, giving it inquiries about myself and my website, I was able to do a good check of accuracy because I know me really well, and I know my own website really well.

So on March 1, I ran the inquiry five times for each, and collected five different responses for each.  In evaluating what it spewed out for each one, I found that the accuracy was a bit questionable, and varied quite a bit.  It got some things right, and it got some things very wrong to the point of being comical.  In its discussion about Schumin Web, it was actually quite insightful, making points that even I hadn’t thought much about, doing way more than I would have otherwise expected from an AI chatbot.  I was also a bit flattered, because in running other people who I feel should be far more notable than me, it didn’t know who they were, even with some additional prodding, while it knew who I was right out of the gate without any additional clarification or questioning, and it knew what Schumin Web was without even blinking.

In judging the accuracy of each output, I scored them by factual claims.  A claim that was accurate got a point.  A claim that was inaccurate got no points.  A claim that was a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information got half a point.  Divide by total number of claims to get an accuracy percentage, which would be the final score.  I don’t know if experts in this sort of thing would score it this way, but it’s the best that I could come up with, and for purposes of this discussion, we’ll go with it. Continue reading…

Categories: Artificial intelligence, Myself, Schumin Web meta

14 minute read

March 3, 2023, 10:00 AM

One of the defining features of sixth grade, i.e. my first year in middle school, was “peer mediation”.  In hindsight, I find it amusing that they tried it, but they certainly meant well by it.  The idea was that who were having a conflict with each other would go into a session with two other students who were trained in mediation who would then facilitate a session to help the two students amicably work out their differences.  I remember that when they pitched it to us, they acted out an example mediation session, which had something to do with a library book that had been double-loaned, i.e. the one kid loaned the library book that was checked out to them to another kid, and then the double-loaned book was not returned to the library by the due date.  They then came to an agreement that one kid would return the book to the library and the other kid would pay the fines for the late return.  Sure, we’ll go with that.  I always felt like that was a poor solution, since the one kid in the example had no business double-loaning a library book in the first place, and therefore the consequences of a lost book should have all been on them, but, hey, what did I know.  After all, we had been living in Arkansas just a few short weeks prior to that, so I had enough going on with the move to Virginia and getting used to a new school and getting to know a whole new group of kids.  Therefore, I couldn’t really judge much, because I had not yet established a baseline for how things were supposed to work there.  I was also brand new to middle school in general, so I didn’t know if that was something that all middle schools did, or if it was something that Stuarts Draft Middle School specifically was doing, if it was some new initiative across the education industry, a statewide thing, a county thing, or whatever have you.  It was also never explained to anyone about why the program was being implemented, or what circumstances led to its creation, nor did anyone ever really communicate what the goals of it were.  Was it to reduce the number of discipline referrals?  Was it to lighten the teachers’ workloads?  Was it to reduce the number of physical confrontations?  No one ever said.

For the first few months of school, I was still processing a lot of information and putting pieces together and figuring things out, so I just sort of filed that information in the back of my brain.  It was there, but I had other things to worry about, like being driven nuts by the realization that the school had conducted a fire drill every single week during the first five weeks of school, among other things (I found out later that Virginia had a law requiring this fire drill overkill, though this is no longer the case).  I also didn’t anticipate that I would actually make use of the service, since I didn’t know that many people yet, being the new kid in town.

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Categories: Middle school

12 minute read

February 27, 2023, 1:24 PM

Sometimes it’s interesting what happens when you discuss copyright infringement amongst your friends.  I recently made a post on Facebook about a company that routinely uses my photos in their work, that I have not had any success in pursuing.  It led to very positive discussion, and I think that I helped a few folks learn something new about intellectual property that they may not have known before.

Unlike most occasions when I will go online and grouse about unauthorized usages of my photography, this one turned up some new discussion besides the standard responses like, “You should sue them,” and the like.  For the record, while taking someone to court over copyright infringement is definitely a possible remedy, it is by no means the only remedy, nor is it something that one takes lightly.  This is not a case of, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.”  A lawsuit is really only a viable option in a small subset of usage cases, and while there have been lawsuits filed on my behalf regarding unauthorized usages, they are exceedingly rare.  Also, note “filed on my behalf” in that last sentence.  I do not file lawsuits myself.  People that I have designated as my agents who know more about these things than I do are the ones who file the suits.  I know my own limits.  Also, people forget that the instances of copyright infringement that I grouse about online are just the ones that really irk me, and also are ones that got away.  Most of my copyright infringement cases are resolved amicably, and you never hear about those.

A few points came up in this discussion that are worth mentioning here.  First was a suggestion that I watermark my images.  This is a perennial suggestion, and, truth be told, it’s something that I’ve tested and implemented in the past, and later had to undo.  Back in the early 2000s, I started some early forays into photo licensing, under a brand called “StratoSearch”.  When I was getting ready to implement that, I started putting watermarks on my photos on Schumin Web in order to prevent clean copies of the larger photos from going out willy-nilly, i.e. reserve the clean versions for paying clients.  With that, I put Schumin Web’s logo in the corner of the full-size images, i.e. the ones that you click through to see.  That was a bit of extra work on my part, but I did it, using a template to apply the logo.  I eventually dropped the licensing effort there after a rebranding and redesign in 2003 failed to drum up any business.  I now understand that my work back then was not to the level of quality that I thought it was, and that my marketing efforts were terrible.  But nonetheless, the watermarks remained.  If you want to see what the watermark looked like in practice, go look on College Life, where the watermark has been retained, and where there are no plans to remove it for historical reasons.

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Categories: Copyright infringement, Social media

6 minute read

February 20, 2023, 12:21 PM

Recently, I was reminded that my phone camera will only get me so far.  Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great camera, with all sorts of functionality built in that creates some downright stunning shots.  But it is still ultimately just a phone camera.  When I really need to go the distance, my real camera, a Nikon D5300 DSLR, will do that.  I got this reminder during two visits to the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, when I photographed the Wilkes Street Tunnel on November 23, 2022, and on a return visit on February 15, 2023.

The first visit, which was part of a much larger adventure with Elyse, as well as our friends Aaron and Evan Stone, was one that I was somewhat unprepared for.  I had known about the tunnel for a while, and it had a place on my “photo shoot ideas” list (which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” considering how many things I add to it, but how little I cross things off of it), but visiting it was not part of the plan.  I didn’t necessarily plan for the day to be a big photography day, but I had made allowances for it nonetheless.  I brought my DSLR along, but I didn’t really intend to do much with it, and certainly didn’t bring the tripod along.  When we ended up at the Wilkes Street Tunnel, more or less by chance, I was kicking myself for not having brought the tripod along.  So I just used my phone, and shot it with handheld phone shots.  The results were okay, but not great.  Specifically, I didn’t like the way that the lighting along the ceiling looked in my shots, with lens flares around the lights.  Other than that, the shots were fine.  Besides the lights, my biggest annoyance was that it was early evening, and people were frequently moving through the tunnel and getting in the way of my shots.  My rule is that you don’t disturb people using a facility as it is intended while you’re photographing.  You wait for them to pass and then continue, and if they stop for you, you wave them through.  The idea is that you can’t get too upset about them, because they’re using the tunnel for what it was intended for, so you just have to work around them.

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Categories: Alexandria, Cameras

24 minute read

February 8, 2023, 9:00 AM

Today marks twenty years since I made one of my favorite early DC adventures.  On that day, February 8, 2003, I drove up from Harrisonburg and headed up to the DC area on a Saturday for a day of fun, photographing the area in the snow and checking out parts of the Metro system that I’d never been to before.  It was my senior year of college, and was one of three trips to DC that I made from my dorm that year.  I also feel like I shot a number of my “classic” DC area photos on this trip, since a lot of photos from this trip have made their way all over the Internet (i.e. you’ve probably seen some of them in the wild, and never realized that they were my work).

This trip had an interesting set of circumstances that led up to it, though.  As I recall, snow had been predicted for Thursday night and Friday morning.  That prediction ultimately came to pass, as it snowed enough to cancel classes for Friday.  This was not unanticipated, so, the night before, as part of my duties as a resident advisor in Potomac Hall, I had posted signs on my floor advising people to check the JMU website for information on class status.  In other words, make sure that you have to go out before you go out, because you might not have to go out if the university cancels classes.  The sign was posted with the intent of putting the responsibility for checking the status onto my residents, so that I would not have to get up early to check the status and post signs to that effect, since I didn’t have classes until later in the day, and would not wake up before the first classes of the day would have started.  So with the signs posted, I went to bed.  Good.  Now fast forward to around 6 AM or so.  I vaguely remembered hearing the phone ring a few times while I was trying to sleep, but I never answered it, because I was trying to sleep.  Then I’m awakened by a very loud banging on my door.  Having just been rudely awakened like that, my first response was to shout, “WHAT?!?”  It was Mecca Marsh, our hall director, i.e. the boss, so it must be important.  I went to get up, and in my haste in getting up, I lost my balance and fell back onto my bed, landing on my left elbow.  When I landed, I heard a series of four or five popping sounds, and I remember thinking, “That can’t be good.”  Apparently, that popping had come from something in my left shoulder, and it now hurt very much.

So what was the big, important reason that Mecca came up and woke me up out of a dead sleep?  Make a sign and put it on the outside door stating that classes were cancelled.  Believe me, she was lucky that my arm was sore from the injury that I had just suffered, because I probably would have hit her otherwise.  I was absolutely seeing red following all of that.  For the amount of effort that she went to, making multiple phone calls and then coming up to my floor and waking me up, just to order me to make a single sign, she could have done it herself.  And when I mentioned that I had just injured my shoulder in the process of getting up, and that it now hurt very much, she responded with a dismissive, “You’ll be fine.”  Yeah, way to show some compassion after an injury that you played a part in causing.  I expected no less from Mecca, though, because she had her favorites on the staff and I was not one of them, and therefore I was treated accordingly.  In any case, I made the sign, and tried to go back to sleep, but I was now pretty mad about what had just happened, plus I was in a good bit of pain.  You understand why I consider Mecca Marsh to be one of the worst bosses that I’ve ever had.  I probably should have seen a doctor on a worker’s comp claim, and I also can’t imagine that the management would have taken too kindly to the whole situation had I reported it like I probably should have, and it wouldn’t have reflected well on Mecca considering that she precipitated the whole thing.  She would have hated that, considering how big she was on propping up her own image (she had some major inadequacy issues of her own).  But I was only 21 and didn’t know any better, so I just suffered through it.

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Categories: Alexandria, Arlington, DC trips, JMU, Northern Virginia, Personal health, Washington DC

7 minute read

January 27, 2023, 9:08 AM

On Thursday, January 26, Elyse, my friend Matthew, and I went to the Washington Auto Show at the Washington Convention Center.  This was Matthew’s first time ever going to the auto show, and the first time that Elyse and I had been since 2020.  Overall, I was less than impressed this time around, but I am not entirely willing to ding the entities involved with putting on the show for it, as I suspect that the ongoing semiconductor shortage is likely to blame for the weak showing at the auto show.  This is the same reason that my new HR-V is taking so long.  And I get it: if they can’t get cars out to paying customers in a reasonable time, it’s hard to justify pulling units out of circulation for demo purposes.  Because of this, the event space was a lot smaller than it usually is, with large sections of the upper and lower event halls’ being sectioned off with curtains.  I got the distinct feeling when I came in that the space was smaller, and it turned out that my feeling was right.  On the plus side, though, one of my big peeves about the auto show in past years was gone, as we didn’t have to wend our way through the convention center’s lobby through a gauntlet of sponsors hawking their products and services that have absolutely nothing to do with cars before getting to the show floor.  All that gauntlet of sponsors ever managed to do was piss me off before I ever got started.  So good riddance to them, and hopefully they don’t come back in future years.  This year, we just came in and went right into the event.

This year, I wanted to go to the auto show in order to check out electric cars.  Recalling my day test driving electric cars in Frederick last spring, I wanted to see what the various manufacturers’ offerings were like.  I still am in the market for an electric car in addition to the HR-V, but following my October 2022 accident in the original HR-V, this has been put on hold for a while.  Following my visit to the auto show, I still got the sense, as was the case last spring, that the electric vehicle market has not yet “arrived”.  Automakers are still going for overly futuristic designs for their electric models to showcase that they’re something different, and a lot of brands still don’t have an entry in the electric market as of yet.  I have said before that I will know that the electric vehicle market has “arrived” when automakers start rolling out electric vehicles with conventional design.  For instance, I’ll know that it’s “arrived” when Honda starts making an electric version of the CR-V that is otherwise exactly the same design as the regular CR-V.  In other words, it’s first and foremost a CR-V, and it just happens to be electric.  Not this whole, “Woooooooo, look at me, I’m electric!” kind of style that we’re seeing now.

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Categories: Honda HR-V (2023), Matthew, Washington DC, WMATA

23 minute read

January 21, 2023, 10:17 AM

On January 5 and 6, while Elyse was at National Harbor attending MAGFest, I did a little overnight trip up north while I was unsupervised.  This was to be a quick adventure, since this wasn’t one of my long weekends, and the goal was to pack as much fun as I could have into two days’ time.  The plan was to leave home in the late morning on the 5th, go up to Philadelphia that day and stay at the Courtyard by Marriott in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, which would stage me for the second day, where I would head over to Trenton and then take the train up to New York.  I would spend about eight hours in New York, ride the train back to Trenton, and then head home from there.  Interestingly enough, this was an adventure where I put more focus on the logistics of the travel than I did on what I would actually do at the destination.  Thus, the execution didn’t go as well as I had intended, as I ended up getting there and then was like, well, now what? as I more or less played it by ear with less direction than I usually like to give myself.  I also knew that this would need to be a more indoor-focused trip, because it was going to be rainy or overcast all day both days.  This adventure was also unusual because on this adventure, the drone stayed home.  The Philadelphia day was not going to be conducive for flying, and New York, forget about it – too many people to worry about.

For the “Philadelphia” day, I actually put more of my efforts into the Wilmington area than I did in Philadelphia.  I have a list of photo shoot ideas on the computer, which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die”, and initially pulled out the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which a photographer friend had previously photographed.  However, I wanted to do the interior, and they also closed at 5 PM, so that would have to be a first stop since it closed relatively early.  So while I wanted to do it, I put it into the “we’ll see” pile, because I wanted to do some stuff in Delaware, which would have to come first because of its location.  I ended up spending a lot of time at Christiana Mall, since I’d been going past it on 95 in 15+ years of adventures up north, but I’d never stopped there in all of that time.

When it came to Christiana Mall, I sort of knew what to expect.  Christiana Mall was a one-story mall, and, unlike a lot of malls these days, was doing well.  As such, I didn’t go in expecting something massive like King of Prussia and then experience disappointment when I got a one-story mall.  Even for a one-story mall, the facility was smaller than I expected, being arranged roughly in a loop.  It had five anchor spots, and they were all filled.  I think that the biggest surprise there was the way that Target was attached to the mall.  In most cases where I’ve seen Target at an enclosed shopping mall, the store is either adjoining the mall but otherwise freestanding (i.e. no mall entrance), or the mall entrance is located at the front of the store near the regular exterior entrance.  Not so at this store.  At Christiana, the mall entrance for Target was in the back of the store.  From the perspective of the store, there was a row of self checkout machines in the random location in the back of the store, and there was a mall entrance nearby.  If it tells you anything about how random the mall entrance’s location is, after I finished up at Target, I had to hunt for that mall entrance in order to get back to the mall.  It is very non-obvious in its placement.

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Categories: Delaware, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, Scion xB, Travel

6 minute read

January 12, 2023, 9:22 AM

One thing that I did not expect to come from the accident that claimed my HR-V was how much it has really bothered me, more than three months down the road.  When I had the fire in the Soul, by the time three months had passed, I was in the HR-V and going along being awesome.  The HR-V would take its first big road trip, an overnight trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania, a little more than three months after the Soul’s demise.  In other words, I got over it quickly.  I suppose it’s because the Soul perished in a fire, and it happened without any direct human intervention, i.e. no human’s actions directly triggered the failure that led to the fire, even though the root cause was shoddy workmanship during the warranty replacement of the engine.

In the case of the HR-V’s demise, the root cause was traceable to one person: Jose Rosalio Abrego Mena.  He failed to stop for a red signal, and despite my best efforts to avoid a collision, there just wasn’t enough room to stop to avoid a collision, and his Nissan Pathfinder struck my HR-V on the left side, roughly on the A-pillar.  I came out of it pretty well despite everything, walking away from the accident with only minor injuries.  However, I feel like it may have left some lasting mental effects on me.  I still get a little jumpy when I see the headlights of a vehicle approaching from a cross street at night, though this has reduced somewhat with time.  I also can’t seem to get the whole incident out of my head, as my time in the train, which often helps me to organize my thoughts, has been a place to dwell on the accident, even though I played no part in causing it.  I keep thinking about how I got knocked out by the airbags.  I keep thinking about how the other driver ran after the accident, and how no charges that I could find were ever filed against the other driver (though I did turn up some old charges for trespassing and fishing without a license).  I think about if there was anything more that I could have done to avoid a collision, such as a hard turn of the wheel, though I admit that once the other driver ran the light, a collision was probably inevitable (but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it).  The accident also made me consider my own mortality, as I think about how easily this collision could have killed me right then and there, and how lucky I was to be able to walk away from it largely unscathed.  In short, I have not gotten over this one by any means, and I desperately wish that I could, but I just can’t seem to stop thinking about it and put it behind me.  I hope that I didn’t end up with a case of PTSD over this, but I’m worried that I might.

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Categories: Gaithersburg, Honda HR-V (2018)

5 minute read

January 6, 2023, 10:12 PM

First of all, I hope everyone had a good new year.  I’m looking at 2023 with much optimism.  2022 was a pretty good year as well, though I did have that car accident in October that totaled my HR-V.  On the whole, though, things are going well in my life, and I hope that it continues throughout the year.

One thing’s for sure: I enter the year quite grateful to be alive.  At the time that the accident with the HR-V happened, I was mad that this idiot had run a light and destroyed my car.  I was quite shaken, but I was walking around, and only suffered a few minor scrapes.  As such, I refused medical care at the time other than the medics’ bandaging up the cut on my head.  In other words, all considered, I came out of it pretty well, and Elyse and I still did the trip to Tennessee that we had previously planned, but in a rental car rather than in my own car.  I was lucky, because things could have been much worse.  Not long after my accident, a friend from college lost their mother to a car accident in Texas.  I don’t know the circumstances surrounding the other accident, but considering my own accident right around the same time, their accident really hit home.  It made me wonder why I managed to survive my accident largely without injury, while my friend’s mother perished.  It was a reminder that life is short, and life is precious, and it could be over in an instant due to circumstances completely outside of your control.  Looking back, I’m pretty sure that the airbag knocked me unconscious for about a minute during the accident, because I remember the collision, and then the next thing I remember, the car was at rest and a bystander was calling for me to get my attention.  I have no recollection of the car’s traveling about 150 feet and coming to rest.  So it was definitely lights out for a minute, but it’s a scary realization that it could have very easily been lights out permanently.  Glad that wasn’t the case.

Otherwise, though, things are looking up.  The new HR-V is coming in March, and Mom’s Scion now feels routine (though I am looking forward to bringing it back to my parents).  I also did some significant upgrades to the house over the course of the year, getting new doors in March, and a new heat pump system just before Christmas.  The new heat pump system is something that I was particularly excited about, because my old system was reaching end of life, and this is new one is a more efficient system.  It also runs a lot more quietly than the old one, which I found a tad disturbing at first, but now I’m used to it.  It also uses the Nest thermostat, which is something that I had wanted to a while, but the old system was not compatible with it.  Now, I can control the temperature of my house from anywhere via my phone, and can also say, “OK Google, set the temperature at [whatever],” and the system will respond.  I dig it.  It’s very smart, and Elyse and I are still learning how to best use it.  We have not yet been on any overnight trips since we got the new system, but we’ll see how that goes when we set vacation mode and such for the Nest.  That or we’ll just turn the system off before leaving and then fire it up by remote a few hours before we’re supposed to return.  I know that we did have an interesting moment on the first day after we got the system, where a setting that detects whether or not we’re home was on and then I went to work.  Elyse wasn’t set up with it yet, so when I left, the heat went off and the house dropped like ten degrees.  We have since disabled that setting, at least for now.

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Categories: Myself, New Year's