Village Green/Town²

School concerts. They bring out the best in us. An auditorium filled with parents, siblings, grandparents, extended family, and friends was the setting for last night's Prism concert at River Hill. The entire music department was represented. The action moved quickly from piece to piece. There was no time to get restless and wonder what would be next. The theme of the concert was celebrations. Large and small ensembles from Band, Strings, Guitar, and Choral Singing were represented. A shoutout to the entire music department: Mike Blackman, Katie Geiger, Rosemary Lather, Richard McCready. Your students performed with knowedge and love. It was a rather special celebration for me because I really felt that I was hearing the music better than I have in some years. A few weeks ago I had tubes put in my ears to address the pressure brought on by my year-round allergies. I know that I feel much better, but I haven't been entirely sure how much it has improved my hearing. Last nigh...

Mental health issues are important to me. I've made no secret of my experience with post partum depression or my ongoing struggles with social anxiety. Daughter HoCoHouseHon wrote about bipolar disorder in 2013 in " Shame ." (Still worth the read, even after four years.) Yesterday Howard County Blogger Jason Booms posted a look into to his own story. Take the time to read it: Spartan Consideratons--" On Depression and Packaged Goods" It is hard to write a piece like this, especially if you shrink from confessional writing. Opening up about things which feel like weakness or personal failure is a brave thing to do. Jason's description of the dark voice that "plays on resentments and fears" is hauntingly familiar to me. Also familiar is the truth that seeking professional help is not a happy ending, but a necessary beginning to what can be a long and bumpy road. Therapy is a piece of the puzzle. Medication can help and sometimes it doesn't. Some...

Let's play a little game. Why do you work? To clarify, if you have a job for which you get a paycheck, why do you have that job? For most that answer would be: for the money. Few people that I know (probably none) go to work day after day purely for personal fulfillment, or for what my mother called " pin money ." Those of us who are working in order to provide for ourselves and for our families need that money. It needs to arrive on schedule as agreed, in a timely manner, and in full. Each paycheck should be accurate. Right? Isn't that just a basic assumption? A job is an agreement between the worker and the employer. Timely and accurate pay is a part of the deal. Not in the Howard County System. Yet again employees received emails telling them of errors in their paychecks. From an employee: This message is for all who are running for the BOE- for the 5th pay period in a row, Para educators and TEACHERS in this county have been paid incorrectly. It is completely una...

The Cubs have won the World Series.   You still have time to vote early.   I have a migraine.   See you tomorrow.

If the weight of the world is getting too much for you this week, take a break and join us for today's blog party at The Turn House. The party is open to bloggers and their readers, so you are definitely invited. You can RSVP here . The Turn House is the new incarnation of what used to be the Coho Grill. I'm looking forward to seeing the transformation. Here's a write-up in the Baltimore Sun for some background. (Video, too!) I'm also looking forward to seeing local blogger-types, who are always good for some interesting conversation and scraps of hocolocal gossip. I know that real life marches on, and the election is bearing down on us inexorably like a natural disaster. Maybe that's the best reason for taking a couple of hours for snacks and drinks and some low-stress human interaction. Join us.      

I love words. My mother loved words. She raised me to adore shades of meaning, flavors and colors of words. And I passed that love on to my older daughter. As a child she would ask me what a particular word meant, and then she would find a word in the definition that she didn't know, so we had to look that up, and then suddenly bedtime was postponed for at least another half-hour as we followed thread after delicious thread through my well-loved Webster's Collegiate. Words: smooth, silky, crunchy, juicy, rich with meaning, heavy with history. When I worked in a library I had this quote posted next to my desk: What can I say? I'm a word nerd. Last night, as we sat around a fire pit on my daughter's driveway, greeting trick or treaters, we enjoyed conversations with kids and parents as they came by. It was an opportunity for my daughter and her husband to do more meeting and greeting with folks in their neighborhood than they had in the last year. In one ...

This is not a restaurant review. This is the tale of a hometown adventure. My husband and I decided to try Sonoma's in Owen Brown last night. We had just enough time to have dinner before picking up our daughter from her youth group activity at the Interfaith Center. We had never eaten there, but it seemed like a no-brainer. It's right across the parking lot from OBIC. First impressions--it's one enormous room with an excess of tevevisions. And then, the realization: we have stumbled on to the Sunday football crowd. The televisions were loud, the patrons were pleasantly boisterous. We took a table and looked around for a waitress. There wasn't one. Well, actually, there was one waitress for the entire place and she was also tending bar. She was very friendly under the circumstances. She took our order promptly, got our drinks, and then... We waited. And waited. And we began to worry that we wouldn't be finished in time to get our daughter. Our phones weren...