Now, about that boot…
December 23, 2015, 5:12 PM
You may recall that this past September’s splash photo showed me posing with a broken merry-go-round at Pentagon City Mall, i.e. this:
Note the choice of footwear. I’m wearing a Crocs shoe on one foot… and a massive boot cast on the other. It was posted without any explanation other than a mention of its presence, but clearly, something was up, because I don’t normally wear a boot around like that.
Continue reading…Categories: Elyse, Personal health, Work
Fun with music…
December 20, 2015, 12:41 PM
This past Thursday, among other places, Elyse and I checked out a store called Bill’s Music in Catonsville. What a wonderful place this was, with professional-grade equipment for sale at professional-grade prices (but you’re paying for quality). The store has every single piece of musical equipment that you could imagine, including some stuff I hadn’t seen in years, like real xylophones and such. Elyse actually knows a thing or two about music, unlike me.
The first thing that we discovered was a metallic xylophone (metallophone?). I hadn’t played one of these since sixth grade music class, a six-week “exploratory” course at Stuarts Draft Middle School. It was pretty awesome, working not so much with singing, but mostly with musical instruments – primarily xylophones. We learned some very basic songs on them, and apparently I still remember a couple of them:
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Middle school, Music, Today's Special, WMATA
Cranberry sauce. From a can.
November 26, 2015, 10:09 PM
First of all, I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. I certainly did. Since I have Wednesdays and Thursdays off for the current pick at work, Thanksgiving worked out perfectly, so I went down to Stuarts Draft on Wednesday and came back Thursday. Not bad.
That said, one of the things that we had with our Thanksgiving dinner was cranberry sauce. My opinion on cranberry sauce is that if it doesn’t look like the can it came out of, it’s not cranberry sauce. Last year, I posted this photo to Instagram, and captioned it thusly:
“This is that weird kind of cranberry sauce that doesn’t look like the can it came out of.”
Categories: Family, Food and drink, Stuarts Draft, Thanksgiving
Spotted a zebra finch today…
November 7, 2015, 11:42 PM
So I was on my layover right before starting my last trip of the night, when a bird flew into the bus shelter, and ran right into the glass sides. The bird apparently didn’t hit very hard, because it never even appeared to act dazed. It was like the Chumbawamba song “Tubthumping“, in that it got knocked down and then got up again. And here it is:
I feel like I was shooting the photos for those motivational posters…
October 25, 2015, 11:12 PM
This past Thursday, I went up to High Rock, which is a rock outcropping on South Mountain in Pen Mar, Maryland, in Washington County near the Pennsylvania border. It reminds me a little bit of both Humpback Rock in Virginia, and the Aqueduct Bridge stub in DC. Like Humpback Rock, it’s high on a mountaintop, however, unlike Humpback Rock, you can drive up to it and park right next to it, rather than parking down below and then hiking a mile straight uphill. Like the Aqueduct Bridge, it’s covered in graffiti and a popular overlook point, but unlike the Aqueduct Bridge, it’s a natural feature rather than manmade. I went up there with the intent of scouting out the location for a potential future set for the Photography section on Schumin Web. I knew it had a view, but I wasn’t so sure about it. I arrived just before 5:00 PM, and stayed for about an hour and a half. While there, I let my curiosity lead the way, as I checked things out at the site and just kind of followed what I found interesting. I don’t know which intrigued me more: the formation itself, the view, or the graffiti.
So here’s what some of the take from this outing looked like:
View from High Rock facing approximately north, towards Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. The bit of stone in the foreground is actually manmade. As much as I can tell, this is some of what remains of an observatory that once stood at this site.
Categories: Maryland, Photography, Walmart, Waynesboro (PA)
What happens to a retired Champion…
October 23, 2015, 10:51 PM
After visiting Diamond Point Plaza just east of Baltimore, Elyse and I set our sights on something else, which she had spotted on South Newkirk Street a few weeks prior. I’m talking about this:
A shopping center full of what once was…
October 21, 2015, 8:40 PM
On Thursday, October 15, my friend Elyse and I went to check out a rare thing in the area of retail: an abandoned Ames store, with the signage mostly intact, just outside Baltimore. For those of you not familiar, Ames was a chain of discount department stores, operating, for the most part, in the northeastern United States. Through the course of its history, Ames acquired and absorbed two other retail chains, purchasing Zayre in 1988, and Hills in 1998, converting stores from their original names to the Ames brand. And each of these acquisitions was a contributing factor to bankruptcies. The Zayre acquisition led to a bankruptcy that lasted from 1990 to 1992, after which the company emerged and returned to profitability. The Hills acquisition led to a bankruptcy in 2001, which led to the chain’s demise in 2002.
The last we heard of Ames was this final voicemail:
Um, just a couple reminders. Payroll needs to be called in by 10 AM on Monday. Um, you can call it in at any point. Leave a message on your payroll representative’s, uh, voice mailbox, um, either with the hours worked, or for salaried associates, number of days worked. Um, you can call that in at any time between Saturday night and Monday morning by 10 AM. Please make sure that the mail, um, post office, has been notified of the forwarding address to the Ames home office, 2418 Main Street, Rocky Hill, Connecticut, 06067. Once again, uh, when leaving the building, um, set the perimeter alarms, bypass the motion. This will, uh, help reduce the number of false alarms after we vacate. Interior lights should be shut off by the breaker, leaving only a few night lights on, scattered around on the salesfloor. The vacate checklist, notate anything that is left, um, from the fixture liquidator, such as any telephone equipment or ticketing equipment. If they haven’t sold it, it will be left where it is. The main thing with all of the fixtures and anything that has not sold is that it be left in the building neatly. Once again, the final vacate checklist. The photos, stamps, should be forwarded to my attention, and mailed by Tuesday, November 12. Once again, I’d like to thank everybody for all their help and cooperation over the past few months, and I wish everybody the very best of luck in the future.
Categories: Baltimore, Elyse, Vintage business
“He offered her the world…”
October 14, 2015, 11:50 PM
I’m always surprised to see how some of my photos are used. I recently got a membership with Pixsy, which skims the Internet for potentially infringing photo usages, and then allows the user to go after infringing users to get them to pay for their usage. One photo that surprised me as a frequent candidate for infringements was this one from 2003:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Roanoke, Schumin Web meta, Television
An afternoon at the Trolley Museum…
September 22, 2015, 11:20 PM
This past Sunday, I was at the National Capital Trolley Museum with Elyse. Unlike most days, where they only run one or two streetcars, this particular day, they were running four. They were running a streetcar from Brussels (by way of Grand Cypress Resort in Florida), a streetcar from New York City’s Third Avenue Railway, the 1971 PCC car from The Hague, as well as an open-air car referred to as “the boat“. We got to ride the first three, but the boat had already been brought in for the day by the time we got there. Ah, well, there’s always next time, as I literally only live two and a half miles away.
These are the cars that we got to ride. First, the former Brussels car:
Categories: Elyse, Silver Spring, Transit, WMATA
Hello… Roanoke?
September 16, 2015, 5:46 PM
This past Friday, I was out with my friend Elyse checking out a few interesting shopping centers in the Baltimore area. We weren’t so much interested in shopping as we were in seeing the centers themselves, and their various eccentricities. We first visited Owings Mills Mall, which is a large. two-story facility in Owings Mills, Maryland that contains only six tenants: Bath & Body Works, DTLR, Gymboree, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Victoria’s Secret. Needless to say, this was a dead mall. Then we visited the Centre at Glen Burnie, which is a small and well-hidden single-level indoor mall off of Route 2 in Glen Burnie. This was no dead mall by any means, but its being an enclosed mall surprised me. I’d been by this shopping center many times in the past, and shopped at the Target store there, and never would have guessed that this was an enclosed mall. Then our third and final mall was Security Square, a mid-sized single-level mall in Woodlawn. Security Square was interesting for its former JCPenney building, which, after Penney’s closed, was converted to “Seoul Plaza”, a mall-within-a-mall consisting mostly of Korean businesses, though now approaching dead mall status (though the rest of the mall is doing well).
However, the biggest surprise of the day came as Elyse and I were walking through the Sears wing of Security Square. Does this remind you of anywhere in particular?
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Shopping
While hunting for a photo…
August 29, 2015, 9:29 PM
Yesterday, I was hunting through my archives to find a photo to show a friend. My photo archives are arranged by subject and by date. If I took a bunch of photos in a single day, then all of those photos typically go into a folder marked with the general subject of the photos and the date. One-off photos usually get dated, marked with their subject, and get put in a folder with all of the one-off shots for the month. The photo that I was looking for depicted a bus sign after the normal text for that route had changed. So I knew what it was, and knew what the photo looked like. I also knew that the photo was a one-off, since I took the photo at Glenmont on the way home from work. However, I didn’t remember exactly when I took it. I had an approximate range for when I took it, but didn’t quite know. So that meant that I needed to hunt.
First of all, I was successful in finding the photo. Here it is, dated September 24, 2012:
Categories: House, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Washington DC, WMATA, Work
I think they just took the “uh-huh” out of Diet Pepsi…
August 20, 2015, 6:25 PM
You may recall that I made a Journal entry back in April regarding some blown blood vessels in my eyes. Turns out that my body will no longer allow me to have coffee, after I discovered that no matter whether it was commercially brewed, brewed at home, cheap coffee, or expensive coffee, I would be awake with an upset stomach. And it was very sudden, too. One day, I could drink as much coffee as I wanted, and then the next, it was verboten. Ultimately, I had to give up coffee completely, which some of my former coworkers might be quite surprised to hear. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the caffeine that was causing the problems, but something else in the coffee that was causing me problems. Therefore, I ended up replacing coffee with diet soda in order to get my caffeine. After initially bouncing between different diet sodas for a while, I eventually became a regular Diet Pepsi drinker. It seemed to work for me, and it tasted pretty good.
Then they started fooling around with the sweetener.
You may have heard the news a few months ago that Pepsi was planning to discontinue the use of aspartame in Diet Pepsi, and replace it with sucralose. For those not familiar with the generic names, aspartame has been marketed under the names NutraSweet and Equal, and sucralose has been marketed as Splenda. Then this past Tuesday, I was at the grocery store, and spotted this:
Categories: Food and drink
The speed van…
July 29, 2015, 9:04 PM
While I was out yesterday, I spotted this van parked on the side of Bonifant Road in Greater Silver Spring (Colesville) near the Trolley Museum and the Intercounty Connector bridge:
This is a white Ford Transit Connect van, with the “Montgomery County Safe Speed” logo on the driver’s side door. This struck me as something that merited further investigation, because the county has been using Bonifant Road to raise revenue through speed enforcement for years. I’ve seen police sitting on the road, and there have been fixed speed camera boxes in various places along this road over the years.
Categories: Driving, Silver Spring
Preserve community heritage, and keep names local…
July 23, 2015, 3:23 PM
In the wake of the June 17 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, a movement has come up to remove things related to the Confederacy from places of honor, and relegate them to history.
That said, if things go that way, a lot of things named for people who fought for the Confederacy will be up for renaming soon. Among other things, there is discussion about renaming Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia. In addition, there has been longstanding discussion in Staunton, Virginia about renaming the city’s public high school, currently named for Robert E. Lee, if it moves from its current, dated building to a new building on a different site.
Now as far as I’m concerned, history is where the Confederacy belongs. I mean, the south lost the Civil War 150 years ago. It’s time that people stopped fighting it, already. However, when it comes to naming places for people, there are different ways to go about it. One way is to name things for a prominent national figure, either current or historical, and the other is to search for someone with a direct connection to the area. If the title of the post didn’t give it away, I support the latter more than the former.
Categories: JMU, State and local politics
Finally, a road photo that I didn’t have to research…
July 11, 2015, 10:12 PM
Whenever I find a photo online showing something amusing on the road, I always like to find out the location. I’ve become rather skilled at looking at background details in photos to sleuth out locations after posting and geotagging countless photos on Panoramio, as well as researching filming locations for Project TXL (a planned overhaul of the Today’s Special site). So imagine my delight to see this funny road photo, showing Thomas the Tank Engine being transported on the back of a truck:
Photo: Imgur
Categories: Harrisonburg, Popular culture, Roads, Today's Special