Village Green/Town²

  Today is International Overdose Awareness Day , “the world’s annual campaign to end overdose, remember without stigma those who have died, and acknowledge the grief of the family and friends left behind.” In Howard County this day will be marked by an event at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ellicott City. From the event page: Join us to celebrate recovery from Substance Use Disorders while learning what services are available in Howard County and Maryland. Importantly we bring forward those we have lost to substance use related causes. We honor by saying their names, lighting candles, and holding them in our hearts. Together we are better! Free Registration https://www.eventbrite.com/e/international-overdose-awareness-day-tickets-376755735547 6:00-7:00 pm - Meet & Greet, Resource Kiosk, Naloxone Training 7:00-8:00 pm. - Program & Candle Lighting International Overdose Awareness Day was established in Australia in 2001. Its goals: To provide an opportunity for people to pu...

  We need to do something about this. It’s just terrible how no one is addressing it. Those people are just hanging around saying trashy things about people.       They don’t even pick up after themselves. They just go on and on,  letting their words pile up around them. You know, they don’t really need help, they’re just trying to get attention.      Just ignore them. If you respond to them they’ll get the attention they want and they’ll never go away. It’s like fishing. They’ll just keep coming back to the same spot. Here’s the thing: they know that NextDoor is the perfect location for getting all the attention they want. Why would they leave?      I heard they can get 500 hits a day just by complaining on NextDoor. 500? Really? Wow!       Yeah, I read it someplace. Or my cousin told me. Perhaps we should focus our attention on connecting these people with the services they need, like volunteer work or therapy....

  Some come from houses, some from apartments, some are homeless. Their caregivers may be parents or step-parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or foster parents. English may be their first language, but, it may not be. They may walk to school, ride a bus, or be driven by a family member. They may be typically developing or have any number or disabilities. Today they are getting ready for the first day of school. They all live in Howard County. It’s really quite amazing that we expect the public school system to accommodate every child, from every background, with every assortment of gifts and challenges. Howard County has seventy eight schools that serve students from preschool age through young adulthood. According to Superintendent Michael Martirano, there are 56,500 of them this year. I’m trying to imagine what 56,500 students looks like. Most of us went to school, and it’s likely that the majority of us went to public school. Our memories are personal and specific to the ti...

  It’s the day before school starts. Around town there’s a bit of that back-to-school excitement. In Oakland Mills there’s a particular buzz around a brand new school: Talbott Springs Elementary. We’ve been listening to the old school be dismantled over the summer which has only reinforced to us the notion that the new school is about to open. We don’t have any elementary aged children. We’re still excited. There will be an official ribbon-cutting ceremony today at one pm. This day has been a long time coming for my community. So many determined and persistent people worked to make it happen. I’m grateful for them.  Other things happening in Columbia today: The Oakland Mills Farmers’ Market , 9 am to 1 pm, Robert Oliver Place Chrysalis Kids: 123 Andrés, 3-4 pm, Chrysalis, Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods (DJ pre show starts at 2:30) Columbia Concert Band , 6:30 pm, Columbia Lakefront Concert for the Human Family: Kory Caudill and Wordsmith , 7:30 pm, Chrysalis, Merriweathe...

  What is a car meet? A gathering of local car enthusiasts on a certain day at a certain time. To others, however, it is much more than that. - - Fuels & Files A gentleman named Vincent Harris has created a Change.org petition that concerns car meets. I saw it posted on Twitter and was intrigued. Car meet? Boba? Ellicott City? Here’s the petition: Okay, now I know where it was and why it has boba in the title. But what on earth is Ambitious Whips? A smoothie emporium? Ambitious Whips is a organization based on car enthusiasts, gear heads, and that are passionate about the car culture. We express our passion with fellow enthusiasts and help support our communities from shows, meets, events, and fundraisers.  And Vincent Harris is the President and CEO of Ambitious Whips, Inc . Here are some promotional images for the Cars and Boba events. Note the presence of events to support charitable causes. So far, so good. I’ve learned that an event that I never even knew existed has...

I’m sharing my very first legitimately “published” piece in this week’s Free Form Friday. It appeared in this summer’s issue of the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly as the back page “My Voice” essay. If you know me in real life you may have already seen this. It’s the story of how I was diagnosed with ADHD just shy of my sixty-second birthday.  Solving the Puzzle of Myself I’ve been squeamish about putting this out into the world because I have worried what people would think. I’ve finally decided to face that fear and be done with it. The truth is, my brain works differently. Perhaps if more people understood the neurological basis of ADHD there would be fewer assumptions that it’s a character flaw or some kind of lazy excuse. I’ve learned that girls are far less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD because we often present differently. We’re not the textbook wiggly, impulsive (boys) that many teachers and clinicians can easily recognize. I’ve discovered that some women who I deeply a...

  And they all lived happily ever after. You already know the story. Angry parents challenged the right of the Howard County School System to have a voting Student Member of the Board. They turned their anger into a lawsuit. That case, heard in Howard County Circuit Court, was unsuccessful. They were granted the right to appeal to Maryland’s highest court. Yesterday the decision was made public. Maryland’s highest court upholds voting rights for student school board members ,  Lillian Reed and Cassidy Jensen,  Baltimore Sun  From the decision: …we agree with the Board and the circuit court that the General Assembly had the constitutional authority to create a student member position for the Howard County Board, establish a process for the election of such member by students in the Howard County public school system, and grant such student member voting rights. This decision affirms the legal authority of the school system to honor student voice in a very tangibl...

  I’m wandering a bit off the track this morning. I was having lunch with my daughter outside of several fast casual eating establishments at Columbia Crossing yesterday and I dragged her into one of my favorite conversational rabbit holes: what if? In the past I’ve explored a variety of “what ifs” on this page, including: what if we had a restaurant called the Magical Soup Company, what if you could get any variety of food by the bucket (like fried chicken), and even, what if the Wilde Lake Village Center were turned into an historical Columbia theme park. I’m fond of imagining things. What can I say? Yesterday’s topic: 99 cents.  Let me explain the premise. The establishment of a ninety nine cent payment to download a song on iTunes or a game or other app created the precedent for buying a small piece of something at a low price. You weren’t getting the whole album or an entire gaming system. Instead you could buy one individual thing. There continues to be a discussion onli...

This Friday, August 26th, is Women’s Equality Day. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I had to look it up to remind myself why. Well, it has been a hard year for women’s equality in the US.  Women’s Equality Day celebrates the day that American women were granted the right to vote. But not all women. That’s the part I didn’t learn in school. It has only been in recent years that I have learned that this right was extended only to white women. Calling a day Women’s Equality Day when it wasn’t for all women is  wrong  stupid  racist  cringe-worthy  shortsighted  inaccurate  problematic  I’ll let you choose. At any rate, maybe that's the reason I had forgotten what Women’s Equality Day was all about. Deep down, something about it troubles me. Here in Howard County there’s going to be a luncheon at the Florence Bain 50+ Center. The focus will be honoring local women’s equality champions. It’s both a thoughtful and creative way of addressing a day w...

Major League Quidditch was in town over the weekend - - Elkridge, to be precise - - and I didn’t know anything about it. Either I am falling down on the job or there wasn’t much social media coverage this year. Of course, a quick search of my own blog shows that I shared news of the event back in February. What can I say? I didn’t put it on my personal calendar. A quick note on the sport of Quidditch: it is being renamed Quadball. You can learn more at their website.  https://mlquidditch.com/sport-inspired-by-quidditch-announces-new-name/  I rather like their slogan: Quadball is a sport for all. Chaos is part of its charm. In an attempt to redeem myself in the arena of local sports coverage, I have a brand new, HoCoLocal event to share with you today. The Old Ellicott Cup. From The Old Ellicott Cup Website The Old Ellicott Cup , organized and promoted by Shawn M. Smith, is a bubble hockey tournament. It will take place September 24th in Old Ellicott City. You’ll never guess w...

Way back in the summer of 2014, the brouhaha du jour centered around the Ulman administration’s decision to limit the sale of sugary drinks at the annual Independence Day festivities at the Columbia lakefront. ( Howard vendors question rules on festival fare , Amanda Yeager, Baltimore Sun) This decision, unpopular to some, was in alignment with the goals of the Horizon Foundation’s “HoCo Unsweetened” Campaign. Some of the resulting pushback was right up there with gnashing one's teeth and rending one's garments. Yet the County was not forbidding the consumption of sugary drinks. They simply weren’t going to sell them at the event. By all means, bring one with you if you simply cannot live without them. Plenty of places in town sold them. But, no. This meant war. Local government had become nothing more than a Nanny-State and people were losing their God-given rights to purchase Coke and Mountain Dew wherever they went. “If we don’t fight this, who knows what’s next in the desce...

  The Columbia Big Band presented an evening of all swing music at a free concert at the Chrysalis last night. I was lucky to find on on-stage seat. Members of the band get set up for the evening. Plenty of folks were seated on the lawn but I wanted be as close as possible to that big, fat brass sound. I wasn’t disappointed. It didn’t hurt that I was just a step from the concessions stand, either. I tried something new. The evening began with a welcome from Inner Arbor Trust President and CEO Nina Basu.  Then it was on to the music.  I fell in love with Big Band music and swing music in high school, believe it or not, listening to two old Glenn Miller record albums on my dad’s stereo system. When I was in college I wrote a paper about how dancing was an important part of American courtship rituals during this time period. I remember reading The Last Convertible by Anton Myrer and getting such a deep sense of how the music - -  and the experience of dancing to live ...

  I was unaware we were at the “having to disclose being related to a trans person” stage of genocide already. Wait, what? Then I saw what this tweet was referencing. “Undeclared trans-identified off-spring.” The words gave me a kind of chill, a tingle of dread. I read the tweet again. I was unaware we were at the “having to disclose being related to a trans person” stage of genocide already. Then I responded: If that is true I would like to disclose being related to all trans people. I didn’t think a lot about it. It came from the heart. If trans people are in danger, then we must all step up to protect them. It starts with me. It was a simple choice. I wasn’t expecting what came next. First, my tweet: If that is true I would like to disclose being related to all trans people. Then: aww! ❤️ Can confirm! Yeah go back far enough and we’re all related  Hello relative 👋  Hello I will see you at the next reunion and bring the potato salad  Uh oh. We seem to have hi...

  What does good journalism looks like?  It brings together facts and human stories while communicating large concepts and small detail. It immerses the reader in a carefully constructed world. Reading it is almost like walking through a room filled with vivid experiences and memories.  ‘I needed to know what happened’: A father’s quest to understand derailment that killed 2 young women in Ellicott City , Jean Marbella, Baltimore Sun In 2012 two young women lost their lives because of a horrific train derailment in Ellicott City.  Ten years ago, their daughter, Rose Mayr, and her near lifelong friend, Elizabeth Nass, both 19, had sneaked onto the tracks where they cross over Main Street in Ellicott City, dangling their feet over the edge and snapping a photo as they sought to cap the end of summer before heading back to college. Instead, an approaching CSX train loaded with thousands of tons of coal derailed, 21 of its 80 cars jumping the tracks. The avalanche o...

  If you saw flyers posted around your neighborhood that read, “Stop the Spread!” what would you guess they’d be about? COVID? Monkey Pox?  In Austin, Texas the goal is to stop the spread of something quite different: Space Barns. They aren’t actually barns. They are not from outer space. But the poster of the message thinks they look like barns from outer space and they don’t like them. They must be stopped. No, this isn’t a local story but it very well could be. How often do we come upon discussions about housing, new construction, and neighborhoods where the underlying message is, in one way or another, “stop the spread”? It seems to be human nature. And sometimes our concerns may be valid and sometimes they are just plain silly. I don’t know if stopping the spread of Space Barns is the hill I’d want to die on. But then, I don’t live in Austin. Click on the photo of flyer to read the text and see what you think. It’s difficult for me to tell if this is sincere or a spoof. H...

  I’ve been saving links to these two thought-provoking articles about National Night Out while trying to find the right opening to share them. Why my family will not attend National Night Out , Half Moon Bay Review, 2018 A National Night Out — Without Police , Sandhya Dirks, KQED, 2018 Interesting that they both happen to be from 2018. I wonder why . I found them when I was searching for other voices and points of view on NNO. I realized this year that I have come to have misgivings about what this event has become in most communities. National Night Out began with the idea that coming out of your home and knowing your neighbors makes you safer. It has evolved into a quasi-festival event that is usually police-centric. You might almost say it’s a police public relations event. “Knowing your neighbors makes you safer” is different than “hanging out with the police makes you safer.” It just is. For instance, knowing your neighbors might give you the confidence to resolve disputes an...

  I have participated in many entertaining conversations about restaurants in Columbia/HoCo that might best be described as “you know, the place that’s in the place that used to be the place that went to that other place.”  For example: The Starbucks in Wilde Lake was previously a KFC, although many locals still call it the Jack in the Box. The Second Chance in Oakland Mills replaced the short-lived Fire Rock Grill, but, most folks remembered The Last Chance Saloon more vividly. I’m sure you can think of a few more. When I saw this bit of news in the Baltimore Business Journal about Columbia’s Ale House I had a hard time believing they’d already been in business for ten years. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that they were building on the site of the well-known restaurant Rocky Run.  Ale House Columbia joins competition on Dobbin Road , Sara Toth, Baltimore Sun, December 12, 2012 And now they’re already old enough to consider a complete overhaul! The BBJ article by Ama...

  Yesterday began with a blissfully cool morning that put me in mind of the coming of Fall. All sorts of thoughts tumbled into my consciousness: leaves changing, trips to the farm for pumpkins, getting ready for going back to school. Adverts on tv and social media have been trying to sell me on the inevitability of the end of the summer season. It wasn’t until I felt that hint in the weather that I could truly take it seriously. The HiLights newsletter from the Howard County Library System reminded me that it’s that time of year again: It’s time to chip in and help Howard County’s own Prepare for Success as they outfit students in need with the tools necessary to start the school year off with confidence. Here’s the link to the supply list.  Questions? You can reach out to Prepare for Success by email:   prepareforsuccess@gmail.org  or by telephone: 443-535-1625. Remember, if it’s not easy or convenient for you to get out to the shops, you can order from their A...

  A good place to catch people’s attention is at the beach. No, I don’t mean with a daring swimsuit, although that’s certainly a possibility. No, I’m talking about ocean front advertising. Like this, from a piece by WMAR2News: Photo credit: Vicky Cutroneo, Howard County Board of Education (shared on Facebook) That’s right. Several area schools systems are advertising for teachers at the beach this summer. Maryland school districts promoting job openings with seaside ads , Rushaad Hayward, WMAR2News My gut response to this was somewhat less than charitable. It went something like this: Sure, go looking for teachers at the beach now, because they’ll never be able to afford a beach vacation once they’re teachers. Another shoot straight from the hip response on Twitter took a different view: What if, instead of advertising on a boat, we spent that money on improving working conditions? Quips like these roll easily off the tongue and usually contain at least a grain of truth, if not a w...