Concentric Circles

Starting with the smallest:

• I told my daughter it was thirty degrees out and she still left the house in that thin faux-leather jacket and no hat.

Slightly larger:

• Someone has abandoned a car with no plates in our parking lot but the police won't do anything because technically our parking lot is private property. Next step, HOA.

Expanding outward:

• Milkweed is being released in Oakland Mills. (See why here.)

Still wider:

• The Still Point appears to have closed its Clarksville location to consolidate with the CA Haven on the Lake operation.

And bigger:

• Bill Woodcock has a sock puppet with a split personality and he's being a really good sport about it. Since it is someone who clearly hopes to influence the opinions of voters in the HoCoBOE race, I'm not amused.

One more:

• Folks turned out to a County Council hearing last night to support a bicycle master plan (among other things.)

Some days the news can be as small as the weather or your parking lot. But for every small story is one bigger, and one bigger still, like ripples expanding on the surface of a pond.

I awoke this morning to the news from Belgium and all I could think was, "someone in my family is getting on an airplane this weekend." It's a huge tragedy, so much bigger than my frame of reference, and it's a story about other people's suffering and loss. But the first thing I did was reframe it with myself at the center.

That's only human, I guess. We see a circle and we want to put ourselves at the center of it.