Twenty years out of college…
July 12, 2023, 12:20 PM
This year marks twenty years since I graduated from college, and in seeing all of the people posting stuff about college graduations and such on Facebook these last few months, it’s made me realize that I have a lot to say about my college experience. It’s one of those things where I wish that I had known then what I do now, and it makes me wonder how things might have gone if I had reached the same present as today, but knowing what I know now.
It’s worth noting that with the passage of time, I have come to view my college years in an increasingly negative light. In the moment, as documented in my College Life website, which now serves as an archive of what was once a section of the main website, I was having a pretty good time and enjoying life – or at least that’s the public face that I tried to put on about it. The truth is that I never felt a sense of belonging there, my performance caused me to develop a major inferiority complex while there, and I coped with the stress of the environment in unhealthy ways. I believe that the root cause of all of my difficulties was a then-undiagnosed case of autism. However, high-functioning cases of autism like I have still weren’t really looked for and diagnosed like they are today. I was not formally diagnosed diagnosed with autism until 2022 at the age of 41, when I finally decided to put the question to rest.
First, though, when it came to my deciding whether or not to go to college, that was never really a decision. My parents had determined, practically from conception, that I would go to college, and that was that. When it’s been drilled into your head that you were going to college like it was a commandment from on high or something for your entire life, that’s just what you did, largely from not knowing any better, and that you would then get a “college job” after getting that degree. So growing up, any thoughts that I might have interest in fields that didn’t require a college education were more or less, quashed and any exploration of those fields was discouraged because that conflicted with my parents’ plan to send me to college. It was also strongly implied that any path that did not lead to a college degree was a failure, because it didn’t live up to my parents’ expectations for me. It caused me to think that the people who went down the vocational track in school were failures, because they couldn’t get into college. I understand that my parents wanted what they thought was best for me, and they considered a college education to be that thing, but the mindset that they inadvertently instilled was quite toxic, and it took many years to unlearn. I suppose that was something of a failure on their part, because with my now being the same age as they were when they were raising me, they almost definitely knew better about jobs that didn’t require a college degree, but that’s not what they instilled in me, intentionally or not.
Continue reading…A missed (or ignored) opportunity to really do some good…
May 9, 2023, 8:39 AM
I’m sure that you all are familiar with how terrible my seventh grade year was at Stuarts Draft Middle School. I’ve written about it at some length, and also discussed it a little bit more after my autism diagnosis last year. Recall that during seventh grade, I had a large problem with bullying, both from the students and from the staff. In fact, that year was unusual because of heavy bullying from fellow students as well as staff. Most of the time, the bullying largely came from the staff, and bullying from fellow students was less so (though it did happen), but in seventh grade, it came from all over pretty consistently (Michael Stonier was just the most memorable of many), and I was miserable for it.
Frank Wade, the chief bully on the staff side that year, had referred me to guidance for my alleged “problems”, and I would visit with Jan Lovell, the guidance counselor, on a weekly basis for the remainder of the year. I didn’t mind going to guidance, because while they were terrible in their own right with their continued attempts to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem rather than the victim, it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with my bullies for a time. In hindsight, though, this was just exchanging one bully, i.e. Mr. Wade and all of the kids that he enabled, for another bully, i.e. Mrs. Lovell the guidance counselor, but one bully was easier to handle than multiple bullies at once, though it was still crappy no matter how you sliced it.
Recently, I was thinking about one thing that I brought to Mrs. Lovell towards the end of the year, and I realized that she either missed or deliberately chose to ignore a tremendous opportunity to look into a bullying problem in the school. It really made me think that while I don’t know how much they were paying her to be the guidance counselor, whatever it was, it was probably too much. At that point in the year, I recognized that things were very bad, and I also recognized that the chances that things would improve before the end of the year were slim to none. To that end, I had already mentally written seventh grade off as irreparable. In other words, I was just doing my best to make it through it, and looked towards the future. To that end, I had prepared a list for the guidance counselor of all of the kids that I did not want to be in homeroom with the following year, with the idea’s being that since guidance was the entity that did student scheduling and such, I was submitting this request to the correct department. It was not a large list, mostly because homerooms were done alphabetically by last name. Therefore, I only had the chance of being in homeroom with people with last names starting with P through Z. So out of about 300 kids in a grade, I only had the possibility of being in homeroom with about 75 of them, and my list was limited to that subset. And considering that students were arranged in three different “teams” in middle school, each belonging to a group of teachers who all worked together with the same kids, what I was really asking was that I be on a different team than these kids in eighth grade.
Categories: Middle school, Schumin Web meta
Thinking about mental math for a moment…
April 19, 2023, 4:55 PM
I’ve mentioned before that working on the train allows me a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Sometimes that leads to my working through some of my problems and coming up with some solutions, sometimes I am mentally writing out Journal entries, sometimes it just replays traumatic experiences over and over again (though writing that letter and then mailing it to the other driver really helped me make peace with things, i.e. mentally, I think I’m going to be okay), but sometimes, I’m just doing things in my head like figuring out how many presidents have unique first names as far as the list of presidents goes, or doing math of some sort.
Funny thing about math. Growing up, I always thought that I was bad at math. I always tended to struggle in math in school, and looking back, I don’t quite understand why, because as an adult, I’m pretty sharp with math. Give me a calculator, and I can solve just about anything. I’m inclined to blame the various teaching methods used for my math struggles growing up, since it wasn’t until college, when I had Dr. Ed Parker at JMU in a summer math class to satisfy my degree requirements, when he taught us algebra in a way that made things finally fall into place. In other words, the way that we teach math kind of sucks. I also realized that I just plain don’t like division. I find it overly complicated. Flip it around and express it as multiplication, though, and I’m fine – then it all makes sense to me. Similarly, I am never doing long division by hand ever again. It’s too complicated, and besides, it’s not like I don’t always have a device with a calculator on it with me all the time these days. This, of course, is contrary to what the teachers always said growing up, i.e. that we wouldn’t have a calculator with us all the time. Clearly, these teachers never anticipated smartphones in the nineties. It’s an even stranger statement considering that calculator watches already existed at that time, even if they were not the most common of things, meaning that some people already did have a calculator on them at all times, strapped to their wrist.
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:
Categories: Driving, Family, Harrisonburg, Howard Johnson's, JMU, Photography, Richmond, Roads, Scion xB, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Travel
It was well-intentioned, but the participants weren’t nearly mature enough…
March 3, 2023, 10:00 AM
One of the defining features of sixth grade, i.e. my first year in middle school, was “peer mediation”. In hindsight, I find it amusing that they tried it, but they certainly meant well by it. The idea was that who were having a conflict with each other would go into a session with two other students who were trained in mediation who would then to facilitate a session to help the two students amicably work out their differences. I remember that when they pitched it to us, they acted out an example mediation session, which had something to do with a library book that had been double-loaned, i.e. the one kid loaned the library book that was checked out to them to another kid, and then the double-loaned book was not returned to the library by the due date. They then came to an agreement that one kid would return the book to the library and the other kid would pay the fines for the late return. Sure, we’ll go with that. I always felt like that was a poor solution, since the one kid in the example had no business double-loaning a library book in the first place, and therefore the consequences of a lost book should have all been on them, but, hey, what did I know. After all, we had been living in Arkansas just a few short weeks prior to that, so I had enough going on with the move to Virginia and getting used to a new school and getting to know a whole new group of kids. Therefore, I couldn’t really judge much, because I had not yet established a baseline for how things were supposed to work there. I was also brand new to middle school in general, so I didn’t know if that was something that all middle schools did, or if it was something that Stuarts Draft Middle School specifically was doing, if it was some new initiative across the education industry, a statewide thing, a county thing, or whatever have you. It was also never explained to anyone about why the program was being implemented, or what circumstances led to its creation, nor did anyone ever really communicate what the goals of it were. Was it to reduce the number of discipline referrals? Was it to lighten the teachers’ workloads? Was it to reduce the number of physical confrontations? No one ever said.
For the first few months of school, I was still processing a lot of information and putting pieces together and figuring things out, so I just sort of filed that information in the back of my brain. It was there, but I had other things to worry about, like being driven nuts by the realization that the school had conducted a fire drill every single week during the first five weeks of school, among other things (I found out later that Virginia had a law requiring this fire drill overkill, though this is no longer the case). I also didn’t anticipate that I would actually make use of the service, since I didn’t know that many people yet, being the new kid in town.
Categories: Middle school
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.
Categories: Alexandria, Arlington, DC trips, JMU, Northern Virginia, Personal health, Washington DC
When I learned the answer, I was not at all surprised…
October 10, 2022, 9:20 AM
Recently, a question that I had been wondering about for a long time was answered definitively. For many years, I had suspected that I had some form of autism spectrum disorder, and over the summer, I took myself in to be evaluated in order to finally get an answer to that question. And the answer is yes, I have Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1, which was formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome. I kind of knew this all along, but I really didn’t want to self-diagnose and then act based on a self-diagnosis. I’m not an expert here, after all, and for something like this, I wanted to do it the right way. I never really discussed it much on here, but just about all of my friends who are autistic had suspected that I was autistic as well. They knew what they were looking at, and they saw it in me.
It certainly took me long enough to get around to getting diagnosed, though. I had wondered if I was on the autism spectrum for quite a number of years, and I had found Dr. Kara Goobic, a doctor who diagnosed autism in adults, about three years ago. I then kind of mentally filed it away for a while, as I had other things going on, though I did ask about other people’s experiences with Dr. Goobic on Reddit one time in a comment and got no response. Then this past spring, my curiosity about the autism question finally got the best of me, and I began communication with Dr. Goobic via email. We discussed what the process would entail, we determined that her practice was able to take my insurance, and we scheduled appointments around my work schedule. The first two sessions discussed my history growing up and as an adult, I completed some questionnaires (Elyse also completed one questionnaire asking about her experience with me), and then the third session was feedback and discussion. The appointments were great. Dr. Goobic and I got along quite well, and the various sessions went smoothly. And in the end, on the third session, which was feedback, I got a lot of different resources and such to check out, and overall, it was a very positive experience. I went into the sessions with Dr. Goobic with the assumption that I was doing this primarily for my own edification, and that from a functional/practical standpoint, having a diagnosis would change nothing for me other than making me a more informed person, and therefore, I had nothing to lose from it, and everything to gain.
The diagnosis confirmed what a lot of us had already suspected, so my reaction was something along the lines of, “Well, there you go.” That was exactly the diagnosis that I was expecting, so I was not surprised at all. A surprise would have been if the process had completed and it had turned out that I wasn’t autistic in some way. Regardless, it’s good to know what the name of the thing is, because when you know what it’s called, then you can do some research on the thing based on its name, and get a better understanding of what it is.
Categories: Childhood, Elementary school, JMU, Middle school, Myself, Work
Thirty years ago, we arrived…
September 5, 2022, 6:10 PM
August 31, 2022 marked 30 years from the day that my family came to Virginia, after having lived in Arkansas for the previous seven and a half years. Thirty years is a little less than three quarters of my life thus far. It just seems so weird to think about it that way. But it really does mark the beginning of an era in my life, because unlike more recent moves, the move from Arkansas to Virginia was a clean separation, leaving a lot of elements of my life behind and starting new in Virginia, especially in those pre-Internet days, when there was no social media to keep in contact with everyone. Additionally, having no family out there, I have not been back since we left. The moves since then were not quite as clean of a break as the move from Arkansas was. My 2007 move to Maryland was only me, and my parents stayed where they were. Plus, as it’s only a few hours away, I can go down there almost any time I want, including down and back in the same day. Then my 2017 move was local, so nothing else changed in my life other than the location of my house, and my commute to work. I just upgraded my living situation, and that was it.
The move to Virginia was the culmination of something that was a long time coming. My parents never really wanted to live in Arkansas to begin with, but it was a good career move for Dad with Scott Nonwovens, so they begrudgingly did it, and so we left New Jersey for Arkansas in February 1985. I remember Mom’s mentioning a number of times early on about wanting to move back to New Jersey. And in all fairness, that was understandable. Dad had something to do in Rogers, as he was the one with the job. Mom didn’t know anyone, and her primary role at that time was to take care of a newborn and a preschooler. She had left everyone she knew when we left New Jersey, and it took a while to meet people and form new relationships, though that improved once Mom got a job at the Walton Life Fitness Center in Bentonville. We also didn’t get along with our next door neighbors on one side, as their kids were out of control. That ultimately led to something of a falling out. We put slats in our existing fence on that side so that we wouldn’t have to see them when we were in the backyard, and they built an entirely new spite fence on their side so that they wouldn’t have to see us. The neighbors on the other side were a retired couple, and they were awesome.
Meanwhile, the education situation in Rogers had really come to a head. I had just completed fifth grade, which was my worst year from kindergarten through high school, without question, and that had followed third and fourth grade years that were pretty rough as well. My parents had gone about as far as they could with the school system, and no one was looking forward to another year at Bonnie Grimes Elementary. I was also hearing all kinds of rumblings at the time from my parents about changes afoot. One was that we would not be returning to Grimes Elementary again, and I was also hearing things about moving, which made me think that something big and life-changing was coming, but nothing concrete as of yet. It had been rumored that Scott had wanted to transfer my father to their corporate office in Philadelphia, and so it seemed like we would probably be moving back to New Jersey, as Mom had wanted all along. I didn’t want to move, because unlike my parents, Rogers was pretty much all that I knew, and I was used to it.
Categories: Arkansas, Childhood, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
A look at Lakeside dining past…
June 23, 2022, 12:56 PM
While I was rounding up all of the material for the photo set about Zane Showker Hall, I dug through a lot of old photos of JMU in order to make sure that I had captured all of the relevant material. Generally speaking, whenever I’m doing a photo set for Life and Times that requires rounding up historical photos or otherwise tells a story that is not in chronological, such as Staunton Mall, which included photos taken over multiple days and also a hefty dose of new material, presented in a very different order than it was originally shot, after I gather it all into a work folder, I sort it all out by subject and place the subjects in the order that I intend to present them. In the case of a smaller, non-chronological set like Showker or Staunton Mall, I will usually write and place photos at the same time. Compare to a travelogue photo set like Toronto or North Carolina, where I will do all of the writing first, and then add photos only after the entire narrative has been written. Regardless of how it’s assembled, though, after I complete the first draft, I will typically start cutting things out, as I tend to load things on pretty heavily in my first draft. Sometimes, I’m cutting things out that are extraneous to the story. Other times, I’m trimming the number of photos down to a more manageable amount.
When I was doing the Showker photo set, I originally planned to include photos of some of the dining attractions that were around the building, and actually did a decent amount of writing related to them. One thing that I planned to include was a little bit about Mrs. Green’s, which was a dining operation in nearby Chandler Hall. I also planned to include some discussion of a small food truck that JMU operated in the mornings in front of Showker that I called the Chuckwagon. I ended up cutting both of those, but for different reasons. As far as Mrs. Green’s went, I originally opted to include it because it was in Chandler Hall, which was demolished to make way for Hartman Hall – thus it was something of a “before” for Hartman Hall. However, considering that I only spent about fifteen minutes in Hartman Hall, tops, it came off as extraneous. So I cut it, which created a tighter photo set. For the bit about the Chuckwagon, I realized that I was devoting a large chunk of space to what was essentially a failed test concept, and it had very little to do with the subject other than its being parked in front of Showker. Ultimately, it took the discussion off on a pretty long tangent, and so in order to keep it on subject, it was removed. And for a photo set that was primarily about architecture, anything not about architecture just didn’t fit.
Categories: JMU, Schumin Web meta
I wonder if someone could have pulled this off…
June 1, 2022, 7:12 PM
Referring back to how being on the train is like being in the shower at times, I started thinking about an event from third grade that happened towards the end of the year, and wondered how the purpose of certain elements about it might have been defeated. The event was a bazaar, and kids could buy and sell items to each other during the event. Some kids made arts and crafts specifically to sell at the event, while some kids sold items brought from home. I was one of the kids who sold items from home, as I used it as an opportunity to get rid of some toys that I didn’t play with anymore. I don’t remember doing much beyond selling during the event, other than taking a quick look around at what the other kids were doing in all three classrooms before going back to my station. I don’t remember my buying anything of note from the bazaar. I think that I may have bought some candy, but that would have been about it. I just remember unloading some of my junk on the other kids. All in all, it was a fun event.
The event used its own special currency, issued by the teachers, and was distributed based on student behavior for a few weeks leading up to the bazaar. They came in three versions: Johnson dollars, Jordan dollars, and Swanson dollars. Good behavior earned you dollars, either individually, or collectively as a class (i.e. everyone in the class got the same amount of money at once) and the teachers would fine students for bad behavior (fines were only levied individually). All three types were named for the issuing teacher, and they all were valued at par with each other (i.e. one Jordan dollar was equal to one Swanson dollar, etc.), and were otherwise considered equal in every way, i.e. despite different designs, it was one accounting system. After all, it was a program to reward good behavior, and not a macroeconomics lesson, though it could have been a fun math activity as well if, say, one Jordan dollar was worth three Swanson dollars, and one Johnson dollar was worth two Jordan dollars. After all, we did learn multiplication and division that year, and it could have been some good real-world practice in navigating currency exchange rates, though it would probably be too complicated for third-graders – especially when there were no cents in this currency to make things more granular.
Whether or not this concept worked as an incentive for good behavior, I don’t know, because in elementary school, I tended to stay in trouble for one reason or another, but I did my best fo play nice in order to maximize my “wealth”, even though I ultimately didn’t buy much (I was Mr. Krabs before he was a thing, I suppose). I imagine that people could discuss the merits or drawbacks of a plan like this to incentivize good behavior among students, which essentially paid them in company scrip to be spent at an event as a reward for good behavior. I imagine that some people would swear by it, while others would call it bribery.
Categories: Elementary school
A little awareness goes a long way…
April 11, 2022, 9:53 AM
Sometimes, it surprises me about how much some people lack awareness about their situation when they get caught in a copyright infringement case. In this case, I sent a takedown notice for a photo of the old Giant Food store on O Street NW in Washington, DC, i.e. this photo:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Middle school, YouTube
“Just singing a song…”
March 15, 2022, 12:00 PM
This past Thursday evening, Elyse and I found ourselves at JMU, touring the recently renovated Zane Showker Hall. I’m going to go into more detail on that adventure later, so stay tuned for that, but while we were in the lecture hall formerly known as G5 (now numbered 0212), I found a microphone up front, and it turned on and worked. When you give me a microphone, you never know what I’m going to do with it. In this instance, I had a little bit of fun with it, and belted out a tune, which Elyse recorded:
Categories: Harrisonburg, JMU, Today's Special
My story from an unforgettable day…
September 8, 2021, 10:31 AM
I can’t believe that this Saturday will mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, otherwise known as 9/11. I still remember that day like it was yesterday, even though so much has gone on in the intervening two decades. They say that everyone can tell you where they were or what they were doing when they found out about 9/11, much like the people of my parents’ generation and the Kennedy assassination.
Back then, I was a junior at JMU, and I was working as a resident advisor in Potomac Hall. It was the third week of classes, and everyone was getting settled into a nice routine. Being a Tuesday, I didn’t have any classes until 2 PM, so I was able to sleep a little later. I was awakened around 9:30 AM by a knock on my door, as one of my residents had accidentally locked themselves out of their room. I put on a bathrobe over my pajamas, and we went down to the hall office, where I completed the paperwork for the lockout (everyone got two free lockouts in a year, and any subsequent lockouts were subject to a fee), and then gave them the spare key to their room so that they could let themselves in. I impressed on them to immediately come back down to the hall office after letting themselves back in their room in order to return the spare key, because I would be sitting in there waiting for them to come back so that I wouldn’t accidentally leave any room key business unfinished. My hall director, Mecca Marsh, was a tough boss to work for, and she did not take kindly to any mistakes. She treated any oversight or error as the worst thing that you could ever do, going so far as to bean you in your performance evaluation for even the most minor of errors, so if I suffered a little inconvenience in order to ensure that I wouldn’t have to deal with Mecca over something, that was fine. So I waited down there and found a way to entertain myself, probably for about five or so minutes, until they came back with the key. Then I put everything back as it needed to be and headed back upstairs. At that time, I was still oblivious to any sort of world events. As far as I knew, it was just a normal Tuesday.
After this, I had another matter of business to attend to. The night before, there was a pretty bad backup in one of the toilets on my floor that I had to deal with, as that fell under the scope of my responsibilities. The toilet got plunged a bit, but ultimately, I had to tape the stall door closed and mark it as out of order, because it was beyond our capabilities as RAs to fix. I took the plunger, which belonged to housekeeping, with me that night, in order to return it to our housekeeper, a lady named Kathy. I hadn’t seen Kathy on my floor from the elevator to my room, so I dipped into my room, grabbed the plunger, and continued looking. She wasn’t anywhere on my floor, and so I went up the stairs to the fifth floor. I went down the hall to the TV lounge, and found Kathy in there. I went in, gave her the plunger, and then looked over at the television.
A flight over JMU…
May 15, 2021, 2:12 PM
On May 10, while Elyse and I were on a weekend trip down to the Shenandoah Valley to see the parents and such, we stopped at JMU, and I took the drone for a flight over the far side of campus across Interstate 81. That is a part of campus that has definitely changed since I was a student, as it’s a lot more built up than it used to be. There are lots of buildings over there that weren’t there when I attended. There’s also a new indoor arena over there called the Atlantic Union Bank Center, or, as the folks on Reddit have taken to calling it, the “Algerdome”, after JMU’s current president, Jonathan Alger. I flew from a facility that was new since I was there, on the roof of a massive parking garage next to the Algerdome, built on the former site of Blue Ridge Hall. That higher vantage point was helpful because it gave me a better line of sight to my aircraft and a better signal for my remote, as there were fewer buildings getting in my way up there.
And here are the photos:
Categories: Harrisonburg, JMU, Photography
Elyse and I got a scooter…
March 2, 2021, 10:00 AM
This past Monday, Elyse and I got a Bird Air scooter. The Bird Air is more or less a consumer version of the Bird scooters that you can rent in various cities. The main difference is that there is no unlocking mechanism, since it’s designed to have one owner, and it also folds up for easy transport. Here it is:
Categories: Elyse, JMU, Recreation/Exercise