A fun and memorable day…
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.
Continue reading…Categories: Alexandria, Arlington, DC trips, JMU, Northern Virginia, Personal health, Washington DC
Going to the auto show…
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.
Categories: Honda HR-V (2023), Matthew, Washington DC, WMATA
A solo adventure up north…
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.
Categories: Delaware, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, Scion xB, Travel
A letter to a bad driver…
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.
Categories: Gaithersburg, Honda HR-V (2018)
Coming into 2023 with optimism…
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.
Categories: Myself, New Year's
I love it when other people are as immature as I am…
December 30, 2022, 9:00 AM
On our most recent trip down to the Staunton area, where I got some update photos for Staunton Mall, among other things, we got an unexpected follow-up to something that we had done on a whim in the New Street garage in downtown Staunton on our September trip, which is where we park when we stay at Hotel 24 South, and then subsequently forgot about. Like many public parking garages, you occasionally find vehicles in there being stored long-term, or sometimes outright abandoned, such as this red Mitsubishi that we spotted in December 2020, which was wearing a thick layer of dirt (it’s since been moved).
More recently, a white Range Rover with an expired North Carolina plate on the second level of the New Street garage was one of those cases, with its having been in its space for a long enough time to be wearing a thick layer of dust and dirt. So in September, as we were leaving the New Street garage on the last day of our trip, I had an idea. I stopped the HR-V in front of it, got a napkin, wet the napkin a little bit, and then had a moment of fun with it, writing a message on the windshield.
(Be advised: some of the photos below this point depict somewhat crude humor that is not necessarily “safe for work”, so be judicious about where you are when you read this.)
You’re taking me for a ride…
December 23, 2022, 12:57 PM
On Friday, November 18, Elyse and I went out to Ashburn for a ride on the new Silver Line extension. This was the conclusion of a long-awaited public works project, bringing the Metro Silver Line out to its intended western terminus in Ashburn, Virginia. You may recall that I did a similar adventure with my friend Matthew on the Silver Line when it opened in 2014. I couldn’t attend the opening day events because I had to work, but Elyse did. She managed to get a ticket to the VIP event by asking nicely, much like I did in 2014, and she had a blast. She got to meet Metro General Manager Randy Clarke, and even got to sound the horn on a 7000-Series railcar.
For this adventure, our day started out with an open house event at the Dulles rail yard, which guided our plans to an extent. Driving over, we listened to “Escapee” by Architecture in Helsinki, which Metro had used for a promotional video for the opening of the first part of the Silver Line. For the first ride on the extension, that seemed fitting. At Dulles yard, we got a tour of the new facility and had a catered lunch. The new facility was quite nice, and we both commented that it looked more like a community college building than a train depot. Lunch was from Panera, we got Silver Line t-shirts, I got my Silver Line pennant to go with the one from 2014, and we also got a special Silver Line cookie:
Categories: Airplanes, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, WMATA
And there are the auction photos…
December 21, 2022, 5:24 PM
There are times when I wish that I was not as well-versed in what happens to a car after a total loss, but after losing my old Kia Soul in a fire in February 2018, and then losing the HR-V in October, here we are. I am experienced in losing cars through no fault of my own, though I admit that it does make the process a bit easier for everyone when the client is already familiar with the process. In this case, I knew that eventually, my car would end up on an auto auction site, just like the Soul did. And today, after searching the HR-V’s VIN in Google, I finally turned it up. So here is what will probably be the last group of photos that we will ever see of my HR-V, from IAAI:
Categories: Honda HR-V (2018), New car
Lots and lots of rubble…
December 21, 2022, 10:54 AM
You may remember that in my last Staunton Mall update, I said, speaking of the mall as it might appear in December, “I would not be surprised if the demolition was complete by then, and we’re looking at an empty slab plus Belk at that time. I suppose that we’ll all find out together whether I’m right or not.” Now that the December trip down that way is over with, I can say that I was not correct. The demolition has certainly progressed, but as of December 16, the work is still by no means complete, though there is now more rubble than there is intact structure.
For this update, I once again did a flyover of the mall with the drone to get both overview and detailed shots of the former Staunton Mall. I started with the overview:
Categories: Augusta County, Scion xB, Staunton, Staunton Mall
You made your bed, and now you have to lie in it…
December 9, 2022, 12:56 PM
Lately, a lot of the DMCA takedown notices that I’ve filed have been for “nostalgia” pages on Facebook. In other words, those pages where people find photos around the Internet of stuff from a given period and then repost them with no permission, no attribution, or anything else. I don’t typically frequent these types of pages myself, but others who are familiar with my work will usually let me know when they spot one of my photos being used in an unauthorized manner. When I’m notified, I will go in and locate it, and then I’ll get all of my ducks in a row before I complete the DMCA form and submit it. And then, unsurprisingly, the people who get nailed get a little salty about it, while never considering for a moment that they may have had a lapse in judgment somewhere.
Two recent instances of this stand out in my mind. The first was for a nostalgia group that focused on the 2000s. In that case, I found a number of photos from my Journal entry about the 2005 remodel of the Walmart in Lexington, Virginia. For that, I had to submit multiple takedown notices in order to cover the various photos that were included, but I got it done. Two days later, I received confirmation from Facebook that the photos were removed. A few hours later, I heard back from the infringer, a woman named Darla Griffin, who was clearly unhappy about the situation that they now found themselves in. Like many infringers, they wrote me to complain, while attempting to verbally lick their own wounds after they got caught.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Social media
The taming of the stroad?
December 1, 2022, 10:00 AM
About three weeks after the accident that claimed my HR-V, I read on The MoCo Show about another accident that occurred on the same stretch of road at Russell Avenue, a block away from where my accident happened, that looked very similar to mine. Additionally, I remember an accident that occurred at the same intersection as mine in May 2020 that Elyse and I encountered while we were out and called in to 911. Taken together, it tells me that Montgomery Village Avenue (MD 124) between Interstate 270 and Midcounty Highway is a poorly designed road that probably needs to be rethought and redesigned in order to increase safety along that stretch.
For those not familiar, Montgomery Village Avenue, along with quite a number of other roads in Montgomery County, is what is often referred to as a “stroad“. Wikipedia defines a stroad as “a type of thoroughfare that is a mix between a street and a road”, and the word itself is a combination of the words “street” and “road”. Basically, it’s a road that wants to function as a local city street and as a major highway all at once, and often fails at both roles. These roads are typically designed for relatively high speeds, but their functioning as a city street with pedestrians and so many private accesses means that the posted speed limits are typically well below the road’s design speed. Do you remember that Journal entry that I wrote in 2013 about people who were getting run over at bus stops in Montgomery County? All of the streets in question were stroads. Georgia Avenue in particular is the textbook definition of a stroad, being a six-lane divided highway with private access, including single-family residential, directly off of the main road from Silver Spring to all the way to Olney. The speed limit for much of that road is 35 mph from Silver Spring to Leisure World, with a posted speed of 25 mph through Wheaton. I speak from experience from ten years’ time living just off of Georgia Avenue that it is very difficult to maintain that speed limit when traffic is moving well, and I often found myself exceeding the speed limit without realizing it and then having to slow down once I do notice. That’s because the road is designed for much higher speeds than traffic is actually allowed to go, and people tend to drive in a way that befits the road design, especially during off hours. They say that if you can speed on a road and not realize it, and not feel that your higher-than-allowed speed is actually dangerous, then the speed limit is too low for the design of the road. In other words, the usual go-to argument of, “LoWeR aLl ThE sPeEd LiMiTs!” is a major non-starter for me, if because the speed limit was already too low for the design of the road, and people weren’t following it anyway, what’s the point of lowering it further? They weren’t following it when it was 35, so what makes you think that they’re going to follow it at 25? I also find the way that people are so quick to blame drivers 100% for accidents to be problematic, because the design of the road can also be a legitimate contributing factor to accidents, such as roads that are designed for much higher speeds than anyone probably ought to drive. It’s kind of like how the “no u-turn” sign is often a symptom of poor road design, because with a better-designed road, you wouldn’t need signage that disallows obvious and mostly reasonable moves to get around the poor road design.
Categories: Driving, Gaithersburg, Montgomery Village, Roads
A long-awaited resolution to a surprisingly contentious issue…
November 18, 2022, 10:00 AM
Sometimes, when it comes to elections, the ones that we lock onto most are little local issues. For me, it was the courthouse issue in Augusta County, Virginia. For those not familiar, Augusta County is the area where I grew up, and the courthouse is located in Staunton. That means, due to all cities’ being independent from counties in Virginia, the Augusta County courthouse is technically located outside of the county (though that is not unique to Augusta County by any means). As I understand it, for quite some time, Augusta County has been short on space for its courts, and has been looking to replace its courthouse with something bigger and more modern. Then to add another wrinkle to this, the rest of the Augusta County government had moved out to nearby Verona, located just north of Staunton, long ago. When we moved to the area in 1992, the Augusta County Government Center was a relatively new building in Verona, and since then, a regional jail has been built in Verona, the sheriff’s office moved to Verona, and the school system headquarters moved to Verona (though the schools moved from elsewhere in the county, not from Staunton). The only thing left in Staunton was the courts. The kicker there was that the location of the courthouse determined what town was the county seat, and moving the county seat required a referendum to be placed before the voters. And as you know, voters can be an odd bunch. Sometimes they perform the way you want or expect them to, but sometimes they don’t. And generally speaking, some things will never pass by referendum. If you’re raising taxes, for example, it will fail when taken to the voters, because in all fairness, who is going to vote to raise their own taxes?
The problem with the courthouse in Augusta County has been longstanding. The Augusta County courthouse had fallen below state standards for court facilities some time ago, and because of that, the county had been given a “show cause” order to improve the courts. County leaders also stated that they were unable to renovate their existing court facilities to meet current state standards. Thus it was necessary to build a new courthouse.
Categories: Augusta County, State and local politics, Staunton, Virginia local news
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.
And the outer walls begin to fall…
November 3, 2022, 8:09 AM
On October 26, Elyse and I took a one-day trip down to Augusta County in order to change to the “permanent temporary solution” for my car problem, i.e. Mom’s Scion xB, following the HR-V’s untimely demise in an accident two and a half weeks prior. I don’t necessarily like doing these sorts of trips in a single day because it’s a lot of driving and I’m not 25 anymore, but that’s all I had time for based on my schedule. I also couldn’t really postpone this trip, because things were going to get a bit more expensive for me if I didn’t do this trip when I did. For those not familiar, when you have Progressive for your insurance and your car is totaled, your rental coverage ends three days after you are notified of your car’s total loss. That notification occurred while Elyse and I were on a weeklong trip to Tennessee, and so Progressive, taking my length of time as a customer (18 years!) into consideration, they extended my coverage until the day after we got back from our trip. Then Enterprise Rent-A-Car would let me pay the insurance rate for my rental for another week beyond that, after which I would have to pay the (much higher) retail rate. My original plan was to switch cars on the way back home, returning the rental car in Staunton, and then doing the last leg of the return trip in Mom’s car. As the trip continued on, though, I soon realized that we would be cutting it far too close with that plan, considering that it was also our Roanoke day, so I opted to postpone the car swap by a week and do the visit with my parents on the way home as we had planned to do it prior to the accident, i.e. it would just be a visit. So the primary focus of this trip was just to swap cars, on the day that the retail rate would have gone into effect, i.e. if you don’t return this car right now, you will be paying a lot more for it going forward. The addition of this new trip down also changed the plans for the last day of the Tennessee trip. Since there would now be an extra trip down to Staunton, I skipped a Staunton Mall update that I had planned for the return trip to save time, since I would be going right there the following week.
For this particular Staunton Mall visit, noting the pace of the progress that I had observed in June, August, and September, I already had a decent idea about what to expect. I figured that by my next visit, the remainder of the mall’s interior would be gone, and they would probably then start working on demolishing the exterior walls, which had remained mostly intact up to this point, which meant that Staunton Mall still largely looked like Staunton Mall from the road during most of the demolition up to that point. I also knew that I didn’t have much time on site this time around, and that the demolition crew would more than likely be on the property. Therefore, this was to be a high-level visit solely by drone, flown from well above the property where I could see my vehicle around the entire mall without having to reposition myself, and staying well clear of the demolition crew, since I didn’t want to get in their way at all, and I also didn’t have any time to discuss any special access with them, as I did in September to photograph what remained of the mall’s interior. All of that said, I made a quick ten-minute flight where I flew from the Orchard Hill Square shopping center across the street, and made a pass across the front of the mall, looped around the entire property, and then dipped down near the Belk entrance where there were no workers present for a momentary peek at that area before returning to the launch site.
Categories: Augusta County, Scion xB, Staunton, Staunton Mall
May the HR-V rest in peace…
October 20, 2022, 8:32 AM
In the early morning on October 9, I was involved in a car accident on the way home from work. At the intersection of Montgomery Village Avenue and Christopher Avenue/Lost Knife Road in Gaithersburg, the driver of a red Nissan Pathfinder on Christopher Avenue ran a red light at what appeared to be full speed as I was going through the intersection, and despite my slamming on the brakes, there just wasn’t enough space to stop in order to avoid a collision. As a result, my car got T-boned on the left side on the front fender and the driver’s door, with enough force to deploy the side curtain airbags and knock my car about 150 feet before it came to rest next to a curb.
After the impact, I remember that I was sitting in the car and noticed that the airbags had gone off, and also noticed that the windshield was shatered at the bottom left. Then I remember hearing a male voice telling me that I needed to get out of the car. I quickly realized that would probably be a good idea, because considering that the car had just gone through a pretty hard collision, for all I knew, it might be on fire. I tried to open my door, but I couldn’t get it open, so I ended up climbing out through the passenger side door. I was quite shaken, I was bleeding above my left eye, my left knee felt sore like it had been scraped, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses anymore for some reason, but nonetheless, I had managed to walk away from it. Then I saw the person who had been telling me that I needed to get out of the car. It was a gentleman wearing black eye makeup (kind of like what the band Kiss does) from an event that he had been at earlier who was also an EMT, and who had witnessed the entire thing. He also quickly told me that the accident was absolutely not my fault, which I appreciated hearing. There was also a woman present who had witnessed the accident, who also agreed that I was not at fault. One of them must have also called 911, because I certainly didn’t, but the police and EMS were there pretty quickly.
When EMS arrived, they quickly took care of me, wrapping some gauze around my head for the bleeding, and taking my blood pressure. Yes, they took my blood pressure. I’m standing on the side of the road next to my now-wrecked car, visibly shaking from the accident, and then the guy tells me that my blood pressure is “kind of high”, coming in at 172/116. I did not need to be told that. I’m usually pretty nice, but I just shot back, in a pretty sarcastic tone, “Gee, I wonder why.” He removed the blood pressure cuff from my arm and went away. Yeah, I just survived a pretty major car accident, got hit by an airbag, had to crawl out the other side of my car, was bleeding from my head, had no glasses, and was shaking. My blood pressure is high? No kidding. I would have been more surprised if it was 120/80 right then rather than some astronomical amount. I refused transport, feeling that it was unnecessary. Then the cops got my information, and took my statement. I also let Elyse know what had happened, and she quickly got an Uber to take her to the scene.
Categories: Driving, Gaithersburg, Honda HR-V (2018), Montgomery Village, Scion xB