I just found out today that my hometown is tearing down a bunch of the schools I attended as a kid and replacing them with brand new ones. This is a good thing… mostly.
My family donated a tree to my elementary school about 22 years ago as a thank you for the great experience we had there. As of right now it appears that tree isn’t part of the new plans for the school, and that bums me out. I just wrote the following email to the school’s current principal in hopes of saving the tree. We’ll see how it goes.
Hello, Mr Housh.
I am a 1993 graduate of Wayne High School and attended Valley Forge K-6 from 1980 to 1986. I’ve lived in North Carolina since 1993 but still maintain close ties with many of the friends I made in the Huber Heights school system.
Just today I discovered the wonderful news about all the new schools HHCS will be building over the next few years. I’m particularly excited to see the plans for Valley Forge on the HHCS website. They look amazing. After campaigning hard during my high school years alongside fellow students and teachers for various levies that never passed, I’m thrilled that the children of Huber Heights will soon have access to such state-of-the-art facilities.
I’m writing you because I have a personal interest in the sycamore tree that currently stands in front of Valley Forge, and I’m curious as to what will happen to it when the new construction begins. I’ve attached a picture of the tree in question.
My mother, father, sister and I donated and planted that tree in 1988 as a token of our appreciation to the Valley Forge faculty and staff for the great education my sister (Wayne ’95) and I received during our time there. Our Valley Forge experience was special to our whole family and we wanted to give the school a gift that represented the enduring impact it had on our lives.
When looking at the plans for the new school, it appears that the tree is potentially standing in what will become the front parking lot, and I’m concerned that it will not survive the construction process. It would be a terrible disappoint to me and my family if this were to happen.
I realize that you are likely not the person making decisions about the new construction. That said, I wanted to get in touch with you first because I know that you would understand how important community is to Valley Forge, why this tree means so much to my family, and why I hope it still means something to the school.
Would you help this message reach the right people within the school system so our concerns are heard? If there is any way to incorporate the tree into the new plans or somehow transplant it to a new location it would mean the world to us.
Thank you for your time and thank you for the work you and your staff do on behalf of our kids. It does not go unnoticed.
Tonight after dinner AG and I stopped into Harris Teeter to pick up some carrots for Shorty, our guinea pig. I went in while Ashley waited in the car. Though this couldn’t sound more boring it turned out to be quite the event.
I was walking across the parking lot with another woman when we both heard the sound of a trumpet being played. We both stopped and turned around to find this little fat kid with a shopping cart in one hand and a trumpet in the other. He was taking the cart back to the little cart corral while playing quick warm-up scales at the same time.
He looked to be about 12 years old and my guess is that he’s getting ready for his first day of summer band tomorrow. As a big time former band nerd myself, I thought it was cool this little kid was so excited about his trumpeting that he was practicing every chance he could get. But at the same time, it was pretty funny too. After an awkward silence with the woman next to me, I said, “Well, you don’t see that every day,” and we both had a chuckle.
After scoring the carrots I came back to the car to find an animated AG waiting for me. As I got in the car she greeted me with a bemused look and said under her breath, “check out the guy in the van across from us without being obvious.”
Peering through my super stealth sunglasses, I saw a shorter Hispanic man in his 40s putting a case of Corona into the passenger seat of what looked like a utility van. After depositing the beer he shut the door and walked around to the driver’s side.
“I see him, ” I said. “What’s the big deal?”
“Just drive.”
So I took off and AG proceeds to tell me what happened after I left to go inside. Apparently this dude got to the van with his beer, set it by the back tire, staggered around for a minute, unzipped his pants, pulled his shirt up, walked to the back of the van – which was facing away from our car so AG couldn’t see – and opened the back van door.
Then she saw a trickle come from underneath the van that soon turned into a nice steady flow. This guy whipped it out and was pissing all over the Harris Teeter parking lot in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon.
“Do you believe that?”, she asked.
My reply? “Well, you don’t see that every day.”
We didn’t get our weekly Sunday grocery shopping trip done because of Father’s Day, so I’m doing that tomorrow night after work. I wasn’t really looking forward to it but now I’m kinda excited. There’s no telling what I’ll see.
This is a test post to see if the new Wordbook plug-in I just installed on the blizzog is working or not.
A small part of the reason I haven’t been posting on the blizzog as much lately is that I’ve been sharing my pithy observations on life and times via Facebook status updates instead of back here in the motherland that is the blizzog.
This Wordbook installation will be a good test to see if I can help bridge the two worlds… kinda like seeing if you can get your significant other to be friends with your ex and it not be weird. Hopefully this will go better than that.
Let me know if you see this on Facebook and give me a shout over on the blizzog. We’ll get these two talking one way or another, even if we have to get them both drunk.
Have you seen the new DirecTV ad that uses tragically deceased child star Heather O’Rourke to hawk their product? When she died right before Poltergeist III came out, MGM went out of their way to be respectful in their marketing of the film. Apparently DirecTV doesn’t give a shit.
I’m not horribly offended or anything, but this is in poor taste, right?
AG and I are enjoying a nice weekend with my parents. They are visiting from Ohio and we’re all staying at the always-awesome Village Inns of Blowing Rock in, erm… Blowing Rock, NC. It’s our favorite place to stay when we come to the Boone / Blowing Rock area to visit.
They’ve just signed up with a new Wifi provider. It’s one of those deals where you have to log in with a password before you can get online. I chuckled this evening when I logged on and saw this screen.
I like how it’s redirecting me to “The Internet” OOOOOOOHHHHHH!!!! How exciting! I’ve always wanted to check out this Internet I’ve heard to much about.
I’m not sure why this strikes me as funny, but it does. It reminds me of when I used to do desktop support at Kenan-Flagler back in the day. Every now and then we’d get a call from one of our users who would exclaim “I need the Internet installed on my machine.”
This usually meant that they needed Netscape installed (this was like 1996, mind you), but we always had a good, geeky laugh together as we pondered how much disk space you’d actually need to store the entire Internet on your computer.
Wow, that was really dorky, wasn’t it? I just read that back and am now regretting sharing that with all of you. Oh well. Too late.
I just read about this service called Picwing that seems kinda neat. You can send me pictures and they show up on the blog. Peep the Picwing page I set up on the blizzog here for more info. Note that you can get back to it using the Picwing link over on the blog sidebar.
Much love to Fake Steve Jobs for bringing me to this new level of musical enlightenment. I honor the place where your video-finding skills and my lust for nasty, bad ass, yodel-your-friggin’-face-off Dutch rock become one.
Even though I make my living in web technology and spend a great deal of time online, I’m not what you’d call an online joiner. I belong to a few of the social networking sites so I can see what’s going on, but I don’t really spend a lot of time joining groups or friending people. And while I read a ton of blogs, I rarely comment on them. I just kinda like to soak things in and keep up with the latest dish.
That said, I did two things today that are out of character for this online wallflower, and both showed me firsthand the power of social networks and blogs to impact my every day life. First, I actually bought something from someone on Facebook. I’ll wait here while you make snide comments about the 32-year old guy who has a Facebook account….
…………
Anyway, I bought a Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago after playing with Joel B’s last month in Ohio. It rocks in many ways, not the least of which is that you can download older NES, Super NES, Sega, and Gamecube games through something called the Wii Virtual Console. The only problem is that you often need GameCube controllers to play these older games. I didn’t have a GameCube, so I wanted some controllers.
I found a nice guy on FaceBook from Chapel Hill selling his GameCube system, a game and 4 controllers for a reasonable price. I messaged him to set up the deal, and since I had the day off today I drove to my old stomping grounds in Tha Thrill and bought everything from him. Very cool. We’ll save the sad story of how I’ve been out of UNC for 10 years and how today was move-in day and how old that all made me feel for another time.
Since I was feeling old and lame on my way back to Greensboro from Chapel Hill, I decided to treat myself to a cool lunch. AG and I love sushi, but we haven’t really found a place that we truly dig in the G’boro area. There are some good ones, but none really as good as the places we used to eat in Raleigh, and definitely none as good as when I used to live in DC.
On a lark, I did a quick Google search on my Treo for “best sushi in Greensboro“. The #2 result was from Ed Cone, a local Greensboro writer, prolific blogger, and UNC fan to boot. Back when I used to have a full-on blogroll, Ed was in it. I still keep up with his blog from time to time via my Bloglines account, and have always enjoyed his work.
In Ed’s post he recommended Sushi Republic near UNC-G. I had remembered reading this post some time ago and wanting to try out Sushi Republic, but AG and I have never found our way down there. So I decided to go for it.
Sushi Republic was great, just as Ed advertised. Here’s the cool part. As I’m finishing up my meal and paying the bill, I look down the sushi bar and see none other than Ed Cone himself!
On my way out the door, I introduced myself to him, told him that I enjoyed his blog and that I was actually in Sushi Republic because of his post. I felt like somewhat of a stalker, but Ed was very nice and told me he was glad I had enjoyed my meal. Actually, in linking to Ed’s blog for my post I see that he has already blogged about our encounter this afternoon. Good times.
Anyway, I’m sure to some of you this is all fairly dorky, but I think it’s pretty cool. In many ways, spending time on the computer — and playing Wii – -can be very isolating and make it less likely that you’ll got out into the real world and actually meet new people and do new things. While I certainly go out and do things and meet people, I haven’t really used blogs or social networks as a catalyst for those experiences until today.
And this lifelong online wallflower is happy to report that those experiences were both good ones. It’s made me think more about getting involved with some of the great local blogging groups here in Greensboro. Who knows? Maybe I’ll make some new friends. It’s already netted me a new sushi joint. Thanks, Ed.
Hopefully this will go better than that.
