The signs of social distance…
March 28, 2020, 12:40 AM
In the era of social distancing brought on by the novel coronavirus, I have definitely observed some changes in how the world looks. As a person who works in an essential industry (people still have to go places, yo), I still get out quite a bit. In my work, service levels have been reduced, and all trains are now eight cars in order to allow people to space themselves out, plus it’s strange to go through some stations in the middle of the day and pick up nobody. It’s also strange seeing the message boards on the Beltway advising people in big letters to stay home. It’s also strange to see so many people wearing gloves and surgical masks, even though those don’t do anything when the general public wears them as a preventative measure, and may actually be harmful if the person wearing them thinks that it excuses them from things like not touching their face, washing their hands, and so on.
In any case, most of the time when I’m going out, it’s to pick up a few things at stores, mostly on my days off of work. The first thing that I noticed was the panic buying, as seen on March 14 at the Target in Rockville:
The toilet paper aisle, picked completely bare.
Continue reading…Categories: COVID-19, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Montgomery County, News
Enhancing the curb appeal of the house…
March 14, 2020, 8:15 AM
Categories: House
Fun in Pennsylvania…
March 7, 2020, 10:00 AM
I guess that you could say that my March came in like a lion. On March 1 and 2, Elyse and I did an overnight trip to south-central Pennsylvania, a 350-mile journey that took us to an abandoned motel, to Breezewood, through three of the four mainline tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, to Harrisburg, and then back home. All in all, we had a fun time.
Our first stop was the aforementioned abandoned motel. This was a former Days Inn near Breezewood, and from what we could tell, it had been abandoned since 2013, and, from the looks of things, it will never be occupied again. Just about every piece of glass in the place had been shattered, the ceiling in the hallways had either fallen down or been pulled down, and there was mold everywhere. Lovely place.
Welcome to Days Inn!
Categories: Breezewood, Harrisburg, Travel, Urban exploration
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.
A Facebook comment should not bother me this much…
February 11, 2020, 11:11 AM
Recently, I commented on a post on the Facebook page for WHSV, the local ABC affiliate for Harrisonburg, Virginia, and got some unusual feedback. The original post was for an article about Trump’s participation in the “March for Life“, an anti-choice demonstration held annually in DC on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.
Before I continue, though, it seems worthwhile to explain my stance on the matter of abortion. My stance is that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. But ultimately, it’s not my call. What other people do with their bodies is their business, and it doesn’t affect me.
I also believe that abortion is more or less a settled matter, but that it has value for the GOP as a campaign issue. In other words, the Republican Party will talk a big game about it, but ultimately, no one is going to ban abortion. Ever. Why ban it and settle the matter decisively in your favor, when you can bring it up as a campaign issue every election cycle and raise money and get people to vote based on it? To actually ban abortion would be to kill the golden goose, and also hand a massive fundraising opportunity to the Democrats. Maybe I’m a bit cynical about the whole thing, but I imagine that if they were really going to act on that issue, they would have done it by now, during the various periods where the GOP has controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. That they haven’t done that tells me that they are not interested in settling it.
Categories: Middle school, National politics, Social media, Stuarts Draft
It’s been a month since the sleeve…
January 19, 2020, 2:05 PM
It has been a little more than a month since I had the gastric sleeve surgery. As of my one-month follow-up appointment with the doctor on January 7, I had lost 23 pounds since the surgery. That is on top of the 16 pounds that I lost while I was on the pre-op liquid diet, for a total of 39 pounds lost in about six weeks. Not bad. I will get weighed next in the middle of February when I have my DOT physical, and so I’ll see how my weight loss is continuing at that time.
The time in the hospital was certainly an interesting experience, and my discussion of it in a previous Journal entry was a bit inadequate, since I was not quite feeling like myself again when I wrote it. I’ve also learned a few things since then about what I experienced that I didn’t know at the time. For one thing, I realized that the reason that I hurt all over was from the gas that they use with the laparoscopy. As part of that process, they pump your abdomen full of carbon dioxide, and that stuff has to go somewhere once the surgery is over. When everyone said “gas pains” about the surgery, I was expecting something more akin to bloating like when you eat something that doesn’t agree with you. You know the kind where you go into the bathroom, you produce a little tiny Brazil nut-sized poop and then just fart a lot but feel better afterward? That’s what I was expecting. This was not that. It turns out that the body has to absorb that gas, and it makes everything hurt, including things that had nothing to do with the surgery. My upper back was sore. My shoulders were sore. My calves were sore, too. It went away after a couple of days, but it definitely made for an unpleasant night at the hospital, since I was sore from that, and all of the stuff that they had attached to me made it difficult to move around in the bed. Let’s just say that I was thankful to sleep in my own bed again the following night. That pain from the gas was a lot more manageable when I was in familiar surroundings and not hooked up to a bunch of stuff.
You’ve also got to love the things that you say while you’re under the influence of the various things that they have you on in the hospital. They gave me all kinds of anti-nausea meds, for one, but then when it was time to go into the operating room, they gave me some stuff through my IV that made me a bit loopy just before wheeling me in. I got into the operating room, and I was thinking, oooooooooooh, look at the pretty lights as I studied all of the reflectors on them. Then when they gave me the gas to put me out, all I could think of was that I wasn’t feeling sleepy. Then the next thing that I remembered, it was done. Later, as two nurses were wheeling me to my room on a stretcher, my hospital gown was apparently disheveled, because they asked me if my testicles were swollen. I said, “No, I just have long nuts.” I imagine that the nurses kind of died a little inside when I said that, but I suppose that such is what happens when the anesthesia is wearing off, because I certainly wouldn’t say that in real life. But it made for a good laugh later on.
Categories: Weight loss
The sounds of Metro…
January 18, 2020, 10:37 AM
Back on July 8, 2007, my friend Matthew and I went on a railfan adventure with a different purpose than we would usually do. Normally, a railfan adventure involved lots of photos and videos. This time, instead of a camera, we brought a laptop and a microphone. The goal was to get some audio recordings of the trains from the interior, for use in BVE, which is a train simulator program for Windows. We worked from the double-ended seats, which were located more or less directly over the wheel trucks and traction motors. I worked the laptop while wearing headphones, while Matthew held up the mic. I’ve never been a big train simulator enthusiast (I prefer watching the real thing vs. operating a simulator), so I don’t know if these recordings ever got used in any of the final versions of these trains, but I loved doing the field work for these sorts of community-built projects. I also did a set of Red Line announcements for the simulator. As I know, there has never been a commercially available train simulator for the DC Metro, so for that, I enjoyed contributing in a small way to what was the only WMATA train simulator out there.
Our adventure that day took us on the Red, Orange, and Blue Lines, and we got recordings of cars 3273 (Breda original), 3185 (Breda rehab), 5028 (CAF), and 1130 (Rohr).
Original Breda car 3273 from Forest Glen to Silver Spring
Categories: Arlington, Matthew, Silver Spring, Washington DC, WMATA
My second experiment with facial hair…
January 5, 2020, 8:53 AM
Friday, January 3 concluded my second experiment in growing facial hair. You may recall my first in October 2009, when I let my whiskers grow during a two-week vacation (16 days’ total growth), and then shaved it off at the end. This time around, Elyse and I made a deal that I wouldn’t shave while I was at home recovering from my recent surgery, with the day of surgery’s being my last shave. The agreement was that I wouldn’t shave again until either I couldn’t stand it anymore, or I went back to work, whichever came first. As it turned out, I was able to go with it for the full period that I was out, which meant that I had 29 days’ worth of facial hair by the time that I shaved. This is what a month’s worth of facial hair growth looks like on me:
Categories: Myself