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Thinking about various church experiences…

March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM

Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school.  It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?”  My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around.  In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later).  But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were.  Some experiences were quite good, while some them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.

For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003.  I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it.  My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion.  Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989.  Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light.  I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack.  Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic.  When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age.  Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.

Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked.  As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time.  By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more.  We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.

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The most pointless school day ever…

February 17, 2024, 8:03 PM

This year marks thirty years since the most pointless day of my entire school career.  It was the only day that I attended where, if I were to do it all over again, I am 100% certain that I would have skipped it.  That was the day that Augusta County decided to have a snow make-up day on a Saturday.  Yes, you read that right: they had school on a Saturday.

I suppose that the lead-up to this made enough sense, because in Augusta County, the winter of 1994 was a very snowy one.  School was cancelled for a total of 16 days over the course of that winter for various weather events, including one instance where we were out for the entire week.  The thing about Augusta County, though, is that the schools use one calendar across the entire county, but being such a large county (only Pittsylvania is larger), the conditions end up being very different in various parts of the county.  So if road conditions would be too treacherous for students in the more rural western part of the county to go to school, they would call a snow day.  Thus, students in the more urbanized eastern part of the county (where I lived) would also get the day off, but our roads, being more heavily traveled, would typically be fine.  So with 16 snow days, three were built into the calendar, i.e. they made the school year 183 days long, assuming that we would have at least three snow days, i.e. those snow days were essentially freebies because the calendar already accounted for them.  That in itself was a first for Augusta County, as the previous year had no built-in snow days at all, therefore all of the snow days that we had that year had to be made up.  For a region that is north enough to get a lot of snow but south enough to where people still freak out over it, it’s surprising that they didn’t build in snow days before 1993, especially considering that the previous year had 14 snow days (why do I still remember this?).  So accounting for the three built-in days, that meant that we had to make up 13 days.

The way that Augusta County allocated make-up days was something that I disagreed with.  They generally preferred to use existing time off within the year for make-up days before extending the year out into June.  While they would add some days at the end of the year before some holidays, they only were in the make-up day plan after one or two other school holidays, conference days, teacher workdays, etc. had already been taken away.  So having 16 snow days, we were going to school five days a week from the last snow event in March all the way to June 17, with no breaks of any kind, as every single teacher workday, parent-teacher conference day, and long holiday weekend had been commandeered for instruction.  I would have preferred to just tack every single make-up day onto the end of the year in June and leave the breaks intact, because I felt like those off days had value because they prevented burnout all around (and trust me, the burnout was heavy that year, and was exacerbated by jackoffs like Frank Wade, who were more than happy to remind us that we had our Memorial Day holiday back in January).  And really, with the schools’ being out for more than two months in the summer already, it’s not like anyone would really notice an extra week.  If they had extended it out to June 24 or beyond, I doubt anyone would have cared much, except maybe those families who planned big vacations immediately after school let out (and they should know that the end date for the school year is really not set in stone until spring).

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A weekend in Augusta County, unsupervised…

December 22, 2023, 5:00 PM

I did my quarterly trip down to Augusta County on December 13-15, and this time, unlike most occasions when I do this trip, I was doing it completely unsupervised.  Elyse was pet-sitting for a friend of ours, and so she was in Fort Washington while I went down to Virginia.  With that in mind, I took full advantage of this situation, packing in all of the stuff that I would want to do that Elyse would probably not have the patience for.  In other words, lots of drone photography, mostly photographing Augusta County school buildings, with the thought’s being that very few people would get good aerials of these relatively small schools.  I had a good time, and I felt very productive.

I got out of the house around 11:00, and then hit the road.  This was a trip where I went down via US 29 and back via I-81, and things immediately did not look good, as I encountered major traffic on the Beltway.  That was annoying, but I recovered well enough, though I did start to contemplate how much of a difference it would have made to go an alternate route for a Charlottesville trajectory, with the thought’s being to 270 to 15 to 29, going via Point of Rocks and Leesburg, or something similar to that.  After all, the alternate route works well when I’m going to I-81.  That alternate route bypasses the Beltway and I-66, going to I-81 via US 340 and Route 7 via Harpers Ferry and Winchester, and only adds seven minutes to the trip.  I ran my proposed alternate route for 29 through Google, and it adds about thirty minutes to the drive to go across Montgomery and Frederick counties via local roads, and then 15 at Point of Rocks, and joining 29 just south of Haymarket.  This also bypasses the busiest part of my route on 29, in the Gainesville area.  The question really becomes a matter of whether this alternate route is worth the additional time to travel it vs. dealing with the annoyances of the Beltway and 66, as well as the additional cost involved with taking the express lanes.

In any case, once I got to the express lanes on the Beltway, I took them, and continued in the express lanes on I-66, because I didn’t want to risk any more delays.  I made a pit stop at the Sheetz in Haymarket, and then from there, I took 15 to 29 and then the rest was normal for a trip down via 29.  The plan was to dip into Warrenton on the way down to photograph some converted restaurant buildings.  I had spotted a few of these on past drives through Warrenton, and now I was going to do them, along with whatever else I found interesting on the way down.  This was also why I hit up the Sheetz in Haymarket rather than the third Sheetz (Bealeton) like I normally would.  Warrenton came before the third Sheetz, and I wanted some food inside of me before I got busy.

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Playing with the AI image generator…

October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM

Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base.  I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me.  My first idea was to have it generate me.  The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.

The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:

"Ben Schumin in Washington, DC" (1)  "Ben Schumin in Washington, DC" (2)

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A blank slate for the future…

September 20, 2023, 8:46 AM

From September 13-15, Elyse and I made our usual trip down to Staunton, where we photographed a bunch of stuff, did a bunch of other stuff, and also saw my parents.  On the middle day of our trip, I did what I consider to be a final update on the demolition of Staunton Mall.  The demolition work had been completed some time between our December trip, when I flew the drone around the mostly-demolished facility, and our March trip, but due to scheduling issues, I wasn’t able get out there to actually photograph it again until September.  With demolition completed, I intended to physically go in and photograph things with my DSLR and my phone, rather than go in by remote via the drone.  The idea was that with the demolition work completed, whatever was left should be pretty stable, so I didn’t need to worry about falling debris or anything else, because it was being left for an indefinite amount of time, until whatever new development that is to replace the mall begins construction.  Don’t get me wrong: the drone is a great piece of equipment, but it isn’t able to capture the same amount of detail that one can get by actually going in with a conventional camera and getting right up close to things.  That’s not a fault of my drone by any means.  You really don’t want to take the drone close enough to anything to get that level of detail in the first place, because that comes with an unacceptable level of risk of an accident.  If the drone makes contact with anything, the motors will stop, and it will go down.  The drone, by its nature, is also much faster moving photography than one might do when shooting conventionally, and as such, you’re not usually able to stop and appreciate what you’re looking at when you’re flying a drone, i.e. it’s easy to miss a lot of details in the moment.  With fairly limited fly time (a drone battery only lasts about 20-25 minutes), it behooves you to get in, get your shots, and get out.  By walking in, I was able to slow down and take more time to focus on my surroundings, and I noticed a lot more detail than I would otherwise.

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Two stories about Woomy…

September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM

Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy.  I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming.  Check these out:

In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy.  Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration.  He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.

Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter.  Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics.  But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.

One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus.  Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf.  Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit.  He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.

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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.

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Making a weekend trip out of a delivery…

April 7, 2023, 10:00 AM

Recently, I was finally able to complete the last little bits of business related to the car accident from last October, and put it all behind me.  On Thursday, March 30, I made the 175-mile journey to Stuarts Draft in the Scion – a trip that would leave it back home with my parents, where it belongs.  And while I was at it, I made a weekend trip out of it, coupling it with a day in Richmond, where I did some photography.  As such, I would traverse what I like to call Virginia’s “Interstate square”.  If you look at a map of Virginia, the various Interstate highways in the state form something like a lopsided square, consisting of I-66 to the north, I-81 to the west, I-64 to the south, and I-95 to the east, and Strasburg, the DC area, Richmond, and Staunton at the corners:

Virginia's Interstate square, with Strasburg, DC, Richmond, and Staunton at the corners.

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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.

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Categories: Afton Mountain, Friends, Travel

Remembering that your phone’s camera is still ultimately a phone camera…

February 20, 2023, 12:21 PM

Recently, I was reminded that my phone camera will only get me so far.  Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great camera, with all sorts of functionality built in that creates some downright stunning shots.  But it is still ultimately just a phone camera.  When I really need to go the distance, my real camera, a Nikon D5300 DSLR, will do that.  I got this reminder during two visits to the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, when I photographed the Wilkes Street Tunnel on November 23, 2022, and on a return visit on February 15, 2023.

The first visit, which was part of a much larger adventure with Elyse, as well as our friends Aaron and Evan Stone, was one that I was somewhat unprepared for.  I had known about the tunnel for a while, and it had a place on my “photo shoot ideas” list (which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” considering how many things I add to it, but how little I cross things off of it), but visiting it was not part of the plan.  I didn’t necessarily plan for the day to be a big photography day, but I had made allowances for it nonetheless.  I brought my DSLR along, but I didn’t really intend to do much with it, and certainly didn’t bring the tripod along.  When we ended up at the Wilkes Street Tunnel, more or less by chance, I was kicking myself for not having brought the tripod along.  So I just used my phone, and shot it with handheld phone shots.  The results were okay, but not great.  Specifically, I didn’t like the way that the lighting along the ceiling looked in my shots, with lens flares around the lights.  Other than that, the shots were fine.  Besides the lights, my biggest annoyance was that it was early evening, and people were frequently moving through the tunnel and getting in the way of my shots.  My rule is that you don’t disturb people using a facility as it is intended while you’re photographing.  You wait for them to pass and then continue, and if they stop for you, you wave them through.  The idea is that you can’t get too upset about them, because they’re using the tunnel for what it was intended for, so you just have to work around them.

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Categories: Alexandria, Cameras

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.

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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.)

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Categories: Staunton, Woomy

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:

One of the Silver Line cookies. They tasted as good as they looked, too!

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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:

Overview of Staunton Mall, facing southeast.

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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.

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