Adventures in the mountains…
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.
Continue reading…Categories: Augusta County, Harrisonburg, JMU, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Travel, Virginia, Walmart
Walmart circa 2006…
November 15, 2022, 1:17 PM
Recently, a commenter on my post about the 2005 remodel of the Lexington Walmart remarked about the evolving interior of these stores. They said, “It’s so interesting seeing as this company is a backbone of America, but people barely document the constantly evolving exterior and interior of a place that millions of people visit every day.” It’s true. Walmart looks very different now than it did ten years ago, which is also very different from the way that it looked ten years before that. After all, ten years ago, in 2012, Walmart stores were mostly blue and yellow on the inside, as the Project Impact store design had been rolled out to most stores. Ten years before that, in 2002, Walmart stores mostly used a lot of blue and red, and had white or gray walls. What we think of when we think “Walmart” constantly is evolving. In the early 1990s, they used fairly simple red signage for departments. Then they switched to larger signage with patterns and photos on it. Then there was the black decor, and Walmart’s switch soon after from red, gray, white, and blue to a brown color palette. Then there was the era of the large wall signs, with small signs that looked like pylons scattered throughout the rest of the store. Then there was a short-lived variation on that wall-signs package that incorporated the new logo. Then there was Project Impact\, which was rolled out in a very concerted effort chainwide, and really made use of the new logo on everything. Project Impact was surprisingly long-lived, with some stores’ being remodeled to the design twice. Then there was another design that we called “Black 2.0” which was fairly minimalistic, and now uses a much warmer color palette and lots of signage.
All of this serves as something of a reminder that what was considered cutting edge one day is considered vintage or otherwise outdated later on. Back in 2006, when I still worked at Walmart, the company had announced their newest store prototype, which had a completely different signage package than my store had, and looked quite flashy for the time, and represented the latest attempt by Walmart, a pretty lowbrow company, to try to convince people that it’s highbrow. I later learned that the Walmart in Culpeper was being remodeled, and was getting this new store design. So on Sunday, September 17, a day that I was off of work from my own store, I headed up to Culpeper to see what it looked like and document it, because I’m a bit of a nerd like that.
Yes, I really did meet Andre the Giant back in 1991…
July 26, 2022, 7:42 PM
Back in the summer of 1991, my life was quite different than it is now. We lived in Rogers, Arkansas back then, and I had just completed fourth grade. My father worked as a quality manager for Scott Nonwovens (now part of Berry Global following a series of acquisitions over the years). My mother worked as a fitness instructor at the Walton Life Fitness Center (WLFC) in Bentonville, i.e. Walmart’s corporate fitness center. That job of Mom’s provided a lot of benefits for the entire family, as we all got access to the fitness center facility, of which we made good use. We were there so much that the fitness center almost felt like a second home at times, what with my taking swimming and Taekwondo classes there, as well as a little fitness camp called “Kids Kamp” during the summers.
One of the benefits that came with the fitness center as far as Mom was concerned was the Walmart employee stock purchase program. I participated in it when I worked for Walmart in the mid 2000s, and as far as I know, the company still has this program. Basically, you elected to set aside a certain amount of money per paycheck, which was then used to purchase shares of Walmart stock in your name. As such, you were afforded all of the rights and privileges that came with being a shareholder, such as voting on issues presented to the shareholders, as well as attending the annual shareholders’ meeting. Back then, Walmart was a much smaller company than it is now, so much of the annual shareholders’ meeting occurred at their corporate headquarters in Bentonville.
One part of the Walmart shareholders’ meeting, at least at that time, was a trade show. A bunch of companies that you’ve probably heard of if you’ve ever shopped at Walmart had booths set up and they were showing off all of their new offerings. In 1991, this was held at the Walmart corporate office (in 1992, it was held in a former Walmart store nearby that they had recently vacated following a relocation). Among various things that we saw there, I got to take a Super Nintendo for a spin and play Super Mario World for the first time at the Nintendo booth, about two and a half months before it was released to the public. I remember being surprised to see so many different buttons on the controller (six compared to two on the original Nintendo), and seeing Mario do two different kinds of jumps, i.e. the spin jump and the regular jump.
Going behind the pylons…
November 19, 2020, 11:31 AM
Back on November 6, Elyse and I took the drone out for a spin again, and I did some photography. This time, we went out to Leesburg, and took a late afternoon golden-hour flight around a familiar landmark: the former Walmart off of Route 15. This is a typical 1990s-era pylon-style store, and it closed in May 2019 when a new Supercenter opened elsewhere in the Leesburg area. Because of the proximity of the location to Leesburg airport, I had to notify the airport of our activity using their online form, and then, whirlybirds away. I flew up and around the building, and even investigated the roof a little bit.
A pre-flight capture, with the HR-V at right.
Categories: Loudoun County, Photography, Walmart
Flying over the Shenandoah Valley with a drone…
October 25, 2020, 10:45 PM
Elyse and I recently made a trip down to Augusta County to see my parents, and we both photographed a bunch of stuff with my drone while we were down there. So all in all, we had a pretty productive time. I have gotten pretty proficient in flying my drone around things, and I’ve gotten some nice photos. The goal of the drone photography this time was to duplicate a lot of what I did in my earlier entry about the area in Microsoft Flight Simulator, but in real life. All in all, I had a good time, and I liked the results, as I flew around Staunton, Waynesboro, Afton Mountain, and Stuarts Draft.
In Staunton, I first got aerials of the old DeJarnette Center, which is an abandoned children’s mental hospital that closed around 1996 in favor of a newer, more modern facility nearby. If this place sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve photographed it before. So here it is:
Categories: Afton Mountain, CFW, Family, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Woomy
These photos could have been taken anywhere…
February 28, 2020, 8:30 AM
While on an outing on Thursday, I stopped to photograph the former Walmart store in Leesburg, Virginia. I had been planning a photo shoot here ever since the store closed in May 2019, upon the opening of a new Supercenter store elsewhere in the Leesburg area. I was drawn to this location because, unlike a lot of former Walmart stores, this one left a massive labelscar on the building due to repaintings over the years, as revealed in photos taken by Aaron Stone. Other Walmarts that closed have had lesser labelscars, and Walmart has also been known to paint out their labelscars. But this one had “WAL★MART” still easily readable in blue. I felt something of a sense of urgency in getting down to this location, because who knows how long a former Walmart will sit idle. Other former Walmart stores in the DC area have been scooped up relatively quickly, such as the former Manassas Walmart, which was quickly converted to other uses. So who knew how long this might remain in this form.
Arriving on site, I couldn’t have gotten better shooting conditions. The skies were partly cloudy, with only a small amount of cloud cover, which worked to my benefit. Completely clear skies make for slightly bluish photos that need to be color corrected in post-production, while partly cloudy skies tend to lend to more accurate colors that require less work at the computer. My only complaint about the conditions was that it was cold and windy, which was not fun to shoot in. By the time I finished this shoot, which took about 25 minutes to do, I was quite cold. It took me some time to warm back up once I got back in the car.
Categories: Loudoun County, Walmart
The remodeling of a Walmart store…
February 19, 2020, 4:33 PM
Back in 2005, I was living in my parents’ house and working for Walmart. I tended to go out a bit after work in order to unwind, and when I did, I would usually do a circuit that took me from my store in Waynesboro up Afton Mountain, down the Blue Ridge Parkway as far south as Route 60, go west on Route 60 to Lexington, and then head back home via I-81. When I did this, the Walmart in Lexington tended to be one of my stops, as it was a logical place to get up, walk around, and shop if I needed to (I didn’t like shopping at my own store because I didn’t feel like a customer there, nor was I treated like a real customer). For a few months that year, Walmart remodeled that store from the late-1990s design that it was given when it was expanded to a Supercenter to the then-current store design, which was the mid-2000s black signage with brown walls. For some reason, I documented this remodel throughout the process via cell phone photos. So here it is. Forgive the quality, because cell phone cameras at the time didn’t take much better photos than a potato, and using Big Mavica would have been too obvious.
When you just hate recognition that much…
May 15, 2018, 11:05 PM
People are always amazed when I tell them that I hate receiving recognition. I just don’t like it. I don’t find it enjoyable. In fact, I find it incredibly awkward all around. I don’t know what it is, but it just isn’t a fun thing. This came to mind recently because of two discussions that I had with colleagues in the last few weeks. One was about an operator competition that my employer was having, and another was about an employee of the month program that my specific division has.
In the case of the former, where train operators go out and demonstrate their skills for judges, I couldn’t see any way to get a satisfactory result for myself as a participant. If I don’t place, I’m kicking myself for not doing better. If I place, then I have to deal with a whole bunch of unwanted recognition. Not participating at all seems to take care of both concerns, and I have no problem attending as a non-competitor and watching others compete. I’ve done that before at a similar event for the bus, where I was there but didn’t compete, and I had a blast. Besides, I have the most fun just being myself while operating the service.
In the case of the latter, a coworker brought up the idea of it, and how I would possibly be a good candidate for the employee of the month award. I was honest about it: if I ever were to get the award, I believe that my response would be, “Thank you very much, but please give it to someone else.” In other words, I would probably decline it. I just want to do my job and call it a day, and a whole bunch of unnecessary attention just gets in the way of my being awesome.
Renting out eight rooms…
September 30, 2017, 12:29 AM
So apparently, I spoke too soon when it came to the closure of The Inn at Afton. You may recall that last month, I announced the closure of The Inn at Afton, based on a sign that said that the lobby and hotel were closed. Elyse and I went down that way again on Wednesday, and one of our stops was to see how The Inn at Afton looked in the daylight after finally going out of business for good. Much to our surprise, we found that the place was open again. We stopped into room 211, which was being used as the lobby, and had a chat with the lady working inside. As it turns out, the hotel is barely operational, with only eight rooms, all on the parking lot side, in service. None of the rooms on the other side, which has a tremendous view of the piedmont, are in service. I’m told that the remaining rooms have been stripped, and a walk past some of the first-floor rooms that are not in service seems to confirm this. That means that out of 118 total rooms, 110 of them are out of service, presumably for being uninhabitable. That’s an availability of 6.7%. For that few rooms, it hardly seems worthwhile to remain open, but apparently, they do, likely out of habit.
Meanwhile, the room being used as the lobby smelled strongly of mold, and had visible mold and water damage. Definitely an unhealthy environment. We might have stuck around for longer and chatted with the very nice lady working there, but the mold smell was too much. I imagine that the rooms that are still in service are just as bad, if they are willing to let the room that they’re using as a lobby become so bad. Thank heavens for Orbit “Bubblemint” gum. It got the mold taste out of my mouth.
So apparently, and much to my surprise, just when we thought that the book had closed on the operational history of the vintage businesses on Afton Mountain, there’s more to the Afton story to be told.
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Friends, Railroads, Stuarts Draft, Vintage business, Walmart, Waynesboro
A few career anniversaries in the next month…
March 23, 2017, 2:04 AM
The next month contains no less than three career anniversaries of mine. March 31 marks ten years since I was fired from Walmart, April 15 marks the 15th anniversary of when CFW Information Services (then Telegate USA) closed and I was laid off, and then April 18 marks ten years from the day that I was hired at Food & Water Watch. Rememberances of jobs past, I suppose.
The anniversary that still gets me is the CFW one. I can’t believe that it’s been fifteen years. That was my first job, which I started at age 16, in June 1997. It was a call center job, processing inbound calls for customers seeking directory assistance services in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, DC, Delaware, and New Jersey. Then Pennsylvania got added to the mix. Then we started doing two national services – one used by bill collectors doing skiptracing, and a wholesale service for the public through a variety of different providers. When the national services came online, I mostly did the bill collector service. That was a good job. The dress code was casual (after all, who saw you?) and you worked at a computer all day.
That job did, however, have a turning point. In June 2000, parent company CFW Communications made a major change to its corporate structure, merging with another regional telecommunications company in Virginia to form nTelos. As part of that same deal, Information Services was out. Our division would not become part of the new nTelos, as we were sold to Telegate, a company based in Munich, Germany. I remember watching this company, which had thrived under CFW ownership, be slowly destroyed under Telegate ownership. If I recall, Telegate acquired our company with the intention of gaining a foothold in the US marketplace, with the desire to eventually launch a “11880” style service in the US like they did in Germany. The “11880” style service never happened, and things basically stayed the same. Meanwhile, for a company with three Virginia call centers (Clifton Forge, Waynesboro, and Winchester), their choice of a headquarters location was surprising: Plano, Texas. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The management in Texas also seemed to come and go on a fairly regular basis, as one after the other either abruptly quit or was dismissed. It was no surprise when Telegate started closing call centers as the business started to drop off (probably due to the hideous management of the company), as Clifton Forge, Waynesboro, and Winchester all closed within about 6-7 months of each other. I was away at college at the time that my center closed, and never received any official notification from Telegate of the center’s closing, but rather, was notified by some of my soon-to-be-former coworkers. It just so happened that I would be in town the weekend before the closing, and so I stopped by to pick up my belongings and turn in my equipment. And that was the end of my first job.
In retail, it’s made abundantly clear that the employee is never right…
August 16, 2016, 8:12 PM
The recent discussion in this space about bad employee behavior made me think of a few incidents that occurred during my time at Walmart back in 2004 that defied logic. These were incidents where I got pulled into the back office and chewed out for something that I had no control over due to policies and procedures in place at the time. One of these even was handled as a “coaching”, short for “Coaching for Improvement”, which is Walmart’s term for its disciplinary process. If you ask me, it’s pretty messed up to discipline someone over something that they have no control over. It’s where you realize that as an employee, you are never right, even when you follow protocol to the letter, and you are also responsible for your managers’ mistakes.
The first incident occurred in the summer of 2004. I got into work, and my boss, the assistant manager over the front end, pulled me aside to speak with me as soon as I clocked in. His first words were, “This is your verbal warning,” i.e. this was a coaching. Lovely. I was then told that they had caught me on camera at the service desk accepting a stolen item for a return. They explained what happened, i.e. that a person had taken a vacuum cleaner off of the shelf, walked it over to the service desk, presented a receipt, and got a their money back for it from me.
While at first glance it might seem like an open-and-shut case, and therefore grounds to discipline me for accepting a stolen item for a return, if you look more deeply into it, that argument starts to fall apart. My job at the service desk was to accept and process returns. In my store, a mid-2000s Supercenter, the service desk was in the middle of the front end, in a space that I referred to as a cave, since it was a windowless room that was only open to the rest of the store on one side.
Nobody can rope a wheel like I can…
July 30, 2016, 10:52 AM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I went up to Harrisburg with another friend to help test drive a bus. My friend had been searching for a bus to convert into an RV, and located a school bus as a potential candidate. I was there because I had a CDL, and therefore could legally drive the bus, and knew what I was talking about when it came to looking the bus over and getting a feel for how it drove. Considering that my work as of late has had me around rail vehicles rather than buses, I was excited, because I hadn’t driven a bus since April.
The bus was a 2007 Thomas Built HDX. For those not familiar, that is a transit-style school bus, i.e. the kind with a flat front. I definitely knew how to drive those, because transit buses have flat fronts, plus I first learned how to drive a bus on a Thomas Built MVP, which is an older version of this bus. Only thing I did have to get used to with this bus was that the turn signal control was on the steering column, whereas on a transit bus, the turn signals are on the floor. School buses should have them on the floor as well, for the same reason that they’re on the floor for transit: it allows you to keep both hands on the wheel at all times. Clearly, whoever placed the stalk for the turn signals had never operated a bus before, because it did feel like something of an awkward reach to operate the turn signal.
I was worried that I might have lost some of my bus-handling skill in the three months that had passed since the last time I had operated a bus, but once I got a feel for the bus, no problem. As I discovered after being out for six weeks for that broken foot, it’s just like riding a bike. However, I did have to get used to the pedals on this bus. Unlike every other bus that I had driven, where the accelerator and the brake pedals are attached to the floor, these were hung from above, like a car. Go figure. But once I got over that, no problem.
Categories: Driving, Elyse, Friends, Harrisburg, Walmart
The only constant is change…
April 5, 2016, 6:06 PM
On March 30 and 31, I went on a road trip down to Stuarts Draft with Elyse, where I showed her a whole bunch of stuff. I showed her the mountain, we visited my ex-store, we went to Staunton Mall, and we saw JMU. All in all, a fun trip. The lesson to be learned from this trip, however, is that change is inevitable, as many things that I had hoped to show Elyse had changed, and other things were going to change.
Coming down from Maryland via US 29, we visited Afton Mountain. I have photographed this area many, many, many times before. So I more or less know what’s there. I did spot a few new things in the process of going about things, like this vintage television:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Family, Fire alarms, Stuarts Draft, Urban exploration, Walmart, Waynesboro
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)
Sometimes you have those weekends where you just have to get out of the house…
June 11, 2014, 6:06 PM
Ever get that feeling of “I just have to get out of the house”? I recently had that feeling, where I just needed a change of scenery for a little bit, and so I planned a weekend trip down to Stuarts Draft to visit the parents, going down Friday, and coming back Sunday. They were, as always, delighted to see me, and on the whole, we had a good time. I also made some extra space in my house, as, on Mom’s request, I brought my sister’s old bicycle back to my parents’ house. Gave me some practice in “beheading” a bicycle by removing the front wheel, and then reattaching it at my destination. But it travels much more easily without the front wheel:
The freshly-liberated front wheel.
Categories: Bicycle, Companies, Driving, Family, Fire drills, Harrisonburg, Middle school, Reddit, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Weather