A very transit-themed weekend…
April 11, 2024, 11:57 PM
On March 28 and 29, I had two very distinct transit-themed adventures. One day was a bus adventure, and the other was rail-related.
The bus adventure came first, on Thursday, March 28. That one has some background to it. First of all, every year for the past several years, I have had what I call a “tax party” with my friend Matthew, where we get together and we take care of our various taxes. Generally speaking, we go somewhere to eat, and then I sit down with the computer and do my own taxes, I do Matthew’s taxes, and I do Elyse’s taxes. This year, the tax party was done in two stages, as Matthew had to cancel at the last minute due to something unforeseen coming up, so I did the taxes for Elyse and me on the original date back in February (where I owed a ton of money because of my photography earnings), and then rescheduled with Matthew for a later date, impressing on him that he really shouldn’t postpone again, since the due date for taxes is a hard date, and you really don’t want to be a last-minute filer if you can avoid it. So we planned the date, and that was that. Now Matthew is also a bit of a transit enthusiast, and has pursued some opportunities in the transit field, but has always gotten cold feet when it came to the thought of actually operating a bus.
Now, along with Elyse, I am also on the board of directors for Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum based in Roanoke, Virginia. Many of us on the board are in the DC area, and some of our vehicles do stay up in the DC area for various reasons. So I pitched the idea to have a small outreach event, taking a bus out for a spin and going to visit Matthew in that. So Elyse and I went down to where the bus was kept, parked the HR-V, and took out the bus. The bus that we had was former Fairfax Connector bus 7754, a 1991 Orion I, which we tend to call MATT, which stands for “Mobile Accessible Travel Training”. As I understand it, this bus originally operated as a regular Fairfax bus, and then was converted to a training vehicle to help older adults and people with disabilities learn to use public transit. I’m not exactly sure how it all worked, but it was fitted with some extra doodads like TV monitors, and has a desk with a swivel seat in the back of it, while the area forward of the rear door has updated seats.
Continue reading…Categories: Alexandria, Driving, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Matthew, Transit, Washington DC, WMATA
Nothing like making a weekend trip to New York and getting sick while there…
January 26, 2024, 11:03 PM
So as discussed previously, on January 17-19, my friend Aaron Stone and I went up to New York City for a weekend trip. We knew that it was supposed to be cold while we were there, and snow was in the forecast for the last day of our trip, but that was about it, and nothing that we couldn’t handle.
Our route up, however, was intentionally planned to be a bit unorthodox. Normally, for a trip to New York, from where I live, you would go straight up I-95 through Baltimore and then take the Delaware Memorial Bridge just before Wilmington, and follow the New Jersey Turnpike most of the rest of the way to the city. This time, we decided to be a bit more roadgeekish, taking US 15 up to Harrisburg, taking I-81 a short distance to I-78, and then taking I-78 all the way to New York. The goal here was to complete all 146 miles of Interstate 78 in one shot. It would only add about 45 minutes to the drive by going this way, and we got to complete a highway. I had previously traveled most of I-78 in the nineties and early 2000s, but I was missing a section in New Jersey, as well as the small New York portion. Aaron, to my knowledge, had never done any of I-78.
My memories of I-78 were never particularly pleasant, as I always associated it with family road trips in the nineties, where my father would drive. He was always very concerned about making good time on these family trips, and that meant some very long distances in the car along some incredibly dull stretches of highway, with nothing of any note to break up the trip. For an eight-hour trip from Stuarts Draft, Virginia to Fairfield, Connecticut, we would make maybe two stops the entire way, once around Paxtonia, and then another one somewhere in New Jersey, and those would be kept as short as possible. In other words, the journey was viewed as a chore, a necessary evil to be knocked out quickly, and not as a part of the adventure. And in those pre-Internet days, there was only so much that one could do to keep one’s self occupied. We would bring all sorts of books and such to read, but those only went so far before we got tired of reading. I-78 in Pennsylvania is largely rural, and while it does go through the Allentown area, it skirts it to the south, far enough away for there to be nothing interesting to see. It’s what led my sister and me to start calling Pennsylvania “the forever state” because it felt like it took forever to get through, and it was incredibly boring. About the only thing interesting on I-78 in Pennsylvania was the Delaware River toll plaza, and that was on the westbound side. I remember, at 12 years old, wishing that the toll plaza was on our side just to help break the monotony.
Categories: COVID-19, Friends, New York City, Personal health
Toronto was fun, and flying… wasn’t bad.
August 11, 2023, 8:09 PM
So the trip to Toronto that I discussed in my earlier Journal entry about going flying again was a whole lot of fun. I did not know that one could pack that much fun into three short days. Seriously, this was a really fun weekend trip, where we got to spend time with friends and see lots of interesting things.
First, though, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, I went through with it and went flying, and no, I didn’t die. I don’t know if I would necessarily characterize flying as “enjoyable”, but it was at least relatively painless. This trip was in part a test to see how well I would tolerate flying, with one of two possible results: either my horizons would be expanded greatly, or I would never fly again. Fortunately, it was the former, as I think that my being much more mature since the last time I flew, plus my doing a little bit of research did me well. I also had Elyse with me, who is something of a seasoned flyer and knew what we needed to do, so I just had to do as I was told. We took public transit from the house to Dulles, via the 58 bus, the Red Line, and the Silver Line. Then security at Dulles was relatively straightforward, throwing all of our stuff on a conveyor belt and running it through this massive machine. Though I did roll my eyes at having to take my shoes off – but I wore flip-flops on purpose in order to expedite that process. Once we got through security, it was just a matter of waiting until our plane arrived and then it was time to board and depart. This whole airport thing was totally new to me, so I was just sort of taking it in. I’d never been past the main atrium at Dulles before, so there was lots to see. We took the air train to our terminal, which was pretty straightforward, but seeing as it was fully enclosed, it was no fun for fanning, since there was no real angle to get a photo of the vehicles. Though with its being fully automated, there was no cab, which meant that you got a great view of the roadway ahead.
A fun weekend where no photography goals were met…
June 29, 2023, 8:44 AM
From June 21-23, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Virginia, but instead of centering on Staunton like we usually do, we centered on Roanoke (but don’t worry – we still saw my parents in Stuarts Draft). We had planned this trip largely as a photography outing, and then the weather didn’t cooperate. It was raining continuously almost the entire time, which made for a more difficult drive than I would have liked, but the trip was worth it. I guess that you could say that while we didn’t necessarily do much in the way as far as photography, we laid the groundwork for future trips by identifying potential subjects. I didn’t want to lay groundwork for the future this time around, as I really wanted to bring home the goods, but such is what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate. I brought my DSLR and my drone on this trip, but neither one of them ever left their respective carrier.
The plan was to drive down from the DC area to Lynchburg via US 29, spend the afternoon and early evening of the first day in Lynchburg, and then head over to Roanoke, where we were staying at the Hampton Inn located downtown (the one built on top of a city parking garage). Then we would spend the entire second day in Roanoke, largely with Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum that Elyse and I both serve on the board of. Then on the last day, we would head up to Staunton and Waynesboro, where I had some things that I wanted to get over there, before going over to see my parents. What ended up happening was pretty similar to plan, but not quite. Our departure was delayed, because we already knew that much of the day would be a rainout. The drive down to Charlottesville was fine, making one stop for food at the third (Bealeton) Sheetz. We made a brief stop at Barracks Road in Charlottesville, and then we were back on the road. It started raining harder once we cleared Charlottesville, and we saw three different accidents between Charlottesville and Amherst where people had clearly wiped out after driving faster than conditions allowed. One of those accidents was a police car, which was clearly totaled in its accident. We took it slowly, especially since I didn’t have that much experience taking the new HR-V in driving rain like this before, plus I wasn’t as familiar with the stretch of 29 from Charlottesville to Lynchburg (particularly from I-64 to VA 151) as I am with 29 north of Charlottesville.
Categories: Friends, Honda HR-V (2023), Lynchburg, Roanoke, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Transit, Travel
Walking through Afton Mountain…
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.
Categories: Afton Mountain, Friends, Travel
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 trip to New Jersey with Elyse and Woomy…
August 14, 2022, 7:57 PM
On Thursday, July 28, Elyse and I took a trip up to New Jersey. The main purpose of the trip was to visit the Scrub Daddy headquarters in Pennsauken, where the company has a retail store. Then we built a day around this in order to justify the trip. We were no stranger to Scrub Daddy by any means, as we had previously stopped by their facility on the last day of our Atlantic City trip back in January, just to see where it was. I remember how excited Elyse was during that visit to Scrub Daddy’s headquarters, and on that occasion, we just photographed the outside of the building, since the retail store wasn’t ready yet. I could only imagine how excited Elyse would be going in and actually seeing the place.
We left the house around 10:00 AM, and got as far as Delaware House by noon. This was to be our potty stop on the way up. Elyse noticed an Edwards Integrity on the outside of the facility, and got some photos of it:
Categories: Companies, Elyse, New Jersey, PATCO, Philadelphia, Products, Roads, Ships, Travel, Woomy
I may be off my hinges, but something seems odd about this…
June 18, 2022, 2:25 PM
A very close friend of mine is currently looking for a new job in order to further their career, and a recent experience of theirs while job hunting struck me as odd. It bothered me because, in the end, all that this company really did was waste my friend’s time. And when someone that I am very close to gets treated poorly, whether through actual malice or simply through indifference, I get upset, because I don’t want to see them be hurt.
For some background information, my friend is currently employed, and as far as I am aware, their current employment relationship is stable. Their situation is not like when I was at Food & Water Watch, where they were actively trying to push me out, and thus a sense of urgency with the job search in order to get out before the hammer ultimately fell. There is no time crunch with my friend. They can afford to be choosy about who they want to work for, and choose the right job rather than a “right now” job. That is a very enviable situation to be in, and it gives them more power than they might otherwise have, because they can choose to wait for better offers.
As part of their job searching strategy, my friend listed their resume on Indeed.com, which is a site where companies recruit candidates via job postings and resume searches. I have mixed feelings about making one’s resume public. When I made my resume public when I was looking for a new job in 2013, I got lots of contacts based on it, mostly by phone, but from all of the wrong kinds of people. I was not interested in working for some shady insurance company or whatever else tried to reach out to me. I quickly got the impression that only shysters used the public resume search functions and that reputable companies don’t because they have plenty of applicants who are seeking them out and thus don’t need to recruit like that, and as such, I pulled my resume. That stopped those sorts of contacts immediately. However, considering the number of sites today that tell people that they should make their resume public, I suspect one of two things about my experience: either my experience was atypical, or a lot has improved in the last nine years to prevent the shysters from locking onto people’s resumes so easily. Either way, it’s left me a bit wary about public resume postings, and as such, I am more guarded about who gets to see my resume, i.e. only people that I want to have it ever get it.
A day out in parts of Virginia that we don’t normally visit…
December 14, 2021, 11:03 PM
From December 9-11, Elyse and I took a little weekend trip down to Staunton, Virginia, where we stayed at Hotel 24 South. We call the place our little home away from home, as we always stay there when we do these trips every 2-3 months. Typically, we do something simple on the first day after we get down there, have a full-day adventure on the middle day (the Staunton Mall photo set came out of one of these middle-day adventures), and then do a few things and go visit my parents on the last day before heading home. It’s a good routine, and it’s a lot of fun.
This time around, our middle-day adventure took us down to Clifton Forge, Covington, and Roanoke. I had not been to the Clifton Forge and Covington area since 2005, and Elyse had never been. Roanoke wasn’t part of our original plan for the day, but as we had not been to Roanoke since 2018, we were probably due for another visit. I had low expectations for the day, considering that the weather was expected to be cloudy (which means gray photos), but I got a few useful things out of the day.
Our first stop was the Howard Johnson’s on Route 11 north of Lexington. I had first become aware of this place after seeing it on Highway Host, and so we decided to visit it again. Elyse wanted to film the elevator, while I was more interested in the architecture. My understanding of the history of this location is that it has always been a Howard Johnson’s ever since it opened in the 1970s, though the attached Howard Johnson’s restaurant later went independent under the name Hilltop Diner, and had closed entirely by 2004.
The master at work…
November 14, 2021, 8:52 PM
Most of the time, when I’m doing photography, I only get to see the end result, which typically ends up on my Flickr page, along with other places. It’s far less common for me to see candid shots of myself, just because I’m usually the one doing all of the photographing. But when you go on a trip that is explicitly photography-oriented, and when everyone is shooting, I end up seeing some candid shots of myself. Recently, from October 15-21, Elyse and I went on a trip to North Carolina and Hampton Roads, where we photographed a lot of stuff, some familiar, and some less familiar. The parts of North Carolina that we visited were almost entirely new territory for both of us, while Hampton Roads was a more familiar setting. In North Carolina, we got together with my friend Patrick, whom I’ve known for a very long time, and had a quick meetup with another friend who formerly lived in the DC area. Then in Hampton Roads, we spent time with Aaron and Evan Stone. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the trip itself right now, because I’m working on a much larger photo set about the adventure for the Life and Times section, so for all of the details, stay tuned, but it will be a while before it releases, because it’s going to be a big one. In any case, some of these shots are posed, but a lot of them are candid. If it tells you anything, when Elyse and I were reviewing them on the big screen in the living room, we put on “Yakety Sax” and laughed a lot.
In any case, here they are. These shots were all taken by Elyse, unless otherwise noted.
Group selfie at the North Carolina welcome center on I-95 southbound. From left to right, there’s Elyse, Woomy, David (a clownfish), and me.
Categories: Elyse, Hampton Roads, Myself, North Carolina, Photography, Travel, Woomy
Going to show that you never know what is going to produce the winning shots…
August 29, 2021, 6:30 PM
On Wednesday, August 25, Elyse and I got together with two friends of ours, Kyle and Pete, and we went up to the Ellicott City area, where we went on a hiking adventure. We hiked up through the remains of what was once part of St. Mary’s College, and which has since become part of Patapsco Valley State Park. The goal was to visit “Hell House”, which is the remains of a structure on the former campus. Elyse was most familiar with this area, so she led the way. The former campus contains the remains of a number of buildings, and we had a pretty fun time there overall. Getting to Hell House was a bit of a challenge, considering that the path is not necessarily obvious and required climbing some steep slopes, but in the end, we made it there.
The hike itself wasn’t too photogenic, but we did see a few things:
Categories: Friends, Howard County, Photography
Does this count as “over 40” problems?
July 18, 2021, 11:27 PM
FYI, this Journal entry discusses gross body functions in personal places. If you’re squeamish about such things, you might want to skip this one. Otherwise, here we go…
This past Friday, I went in for some minor surgery to fix a small problem. Back in April, I had developed what turned out to be an abscess on my backside. I didn’t quite know what it was for a while, and was doing what they say that you shouldn’t do, and looked up my symptoms on Google. It seems like every time you google your symptoms, it always comes back as a heart attack, and therefore, you need to get your tail to the emergency room right now. But I knew better. Even controlling for definitely-not-a-heart-attack, though, I still got inconclusive results, i.e. Dr. Google had no clue what it was. All the while, this thing was uncomfortable. At its peak, it was so painful that it was difficult to sit. And considering that my job is performed from a seated position, that point really made for a long day. At one point, I tried squeezing it, and pus came out of it. That made me feel a little better for a little while, but it quickly filled back up and continued to hurt. Eventually it started to drain on its own without any prompting from me. That felt a little better because there was no more pressure, but it was still painful, and now it was draining all the time and making a mess in my underwear, even soaking through my pants on occasion, which is not a good thing by any means. I don’t like having to choose my outfits based on thickness and color of material in order to prevent embarrassing abscess leaks from showing up.
I eventually went to an urgent care facility, and there, the doctor diagnosed it as a cutaneous abscess, and prescribed a course of antibiotics (Bactrim) for it. According to the urgent care doctor, the abscess should take care of itself without any further intervention. As it would turn out, the antibiotic took care of the infection in very short order, but the drain opening remained, and things kept on draining, albeit with less volume than before, which kept the leakage contained to my underwear and not going through my pants anymore. I figured that some drainage was normal, considering that I had just had a big abscess that was being treated. But then it kept on going, even after the infection had subsided, and after I finished up all of the antibiotics. I kept holding out some hope for a while that it would resolve on its own, but it never did.
Categories: Matthew, Personal health, Woomy
A lesson on how not to behave when doing advocacy work…
April 27, 2021, 12:55 AM
Lately, there has been a small grassroots movement in Montgomery Village called “Citizens for Airpark Safety” complaining about noise from the Montgomery County Airpark (GAI/KGAI), which is a small public-use general aviation airport located in the Gaithersburg area. I had heard rumblings about this from a few folks on a local Montgomery Village group that Elyse and I are in, but then it recently made its way to the physical space on Sunday when I found this on my front door as I was leaving for work:
Categories: Activism, Elyse, Montgomery Village
No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose…
April 6, 2021, 1:30 PM
You probably didn’t realize it, but for the first half of 2020, Elyse and I hosted a now-former friend of ours, her boyfriend, and her infant child in the house. That was a situation that we would have never touched with a ten-foot pole if we had known how it would ultimately turn out. What was supposed to have been a two-month stay for one adult and an infant ended up being a six-month stay for two adults and an infant, and ended up with a destroyed friendship, a lot of hurt feelings, and resentment all around.
The story starts out in the middle of 2019, when our friend started a long-distance relationship with a guy that she had gone to high school with. He was now serving in the army, and stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. In a very short time, that relationship turned into an engagement. Elyse and I both agreed that relationship had progressed very rapidly – much faster than either one of us would have ever been comfortable with if it were happening to us. Then in September, when we were planning an outing together, we learned that our friend was pregnant, and also, that she was no longer seeing the person with whom she had been engaged, who was also the father of her then-unborn child. As I was told, the fiancé had cheated on her, and so she broke off the engagement. By the time that we actually got together again, she had gotten a new boyfriend, and he would be joining us on this adventure. I was fine with this, because I usually got along with this friend’s friends, and this seemed to be no exception, as the guy seemed nice enough. In December, Elyse and I were invited to our friend’s baby shower. We went, we brought gifts, and generally had a good time. The one awkward moment at the whole baby shower was seeing the interaction between the boyfriend and her father. My friend’s father made a big deal about refusing to shake the boyfriend’s hand, and the boyfriend was clearly not amused by that gesture. I was a bit uncomfortable just witnessing it. I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, as the boyfriend had given me no reason for me to suspect anything in our previous meeting, plus the boyfriend was not the one who got her pregnant and subsequently cheated on her. So I just chalked it up to a “no one is good enough for my little girl” attitude on her father’s part.
Dueling reviews?
March 13, 2021, 8:25 PM
A few weeks ago, Elyse bought some ice cream from H Mart, which is a chain of international grocery stores. One was cheese-flavored, and the other was corn and cheese-flavored. Both of those are flavors that you don’t typically see in regular grocery stores. Elyse had planned to review them on YouTube, and she did so in a live video on Friday night:
Categories: Elyse, Food and drink