Cramming

It is often said that your worst days at work are the day before you leave for vacation and the day you come back. That’s why we came back yesterday. We needed today to gird for the reentry to reality.

Arriving home in the late afternoon, we commenced with the usual stuff like unpacking, sorting through a weeks worth of mail, and discovering that the kitchen faucet is no longer working. Last night we ate sushi. I later fell asleep watching Game Change. That wasn't a statement on what I thought of the film. I had been up since 5:00 AM. A day of schlepping through airports, a glass of wine at dinner and a second back at home did me in. 

Today was more productive. We even fixed the faucet thanks to Mama Wordbones tenacity and somewhat amazing plumbing skills.

I also have to carve out time to get caught up on the latest HoCo news. Since I was some 1,500 miles south on our normal Friday podcast day last week, we went ahead and pushed it to Monday afternoon.

That’s like tomorrow Monday.

And we have a guest, Dr. Calvin Ball. We last had the good doctor as a guest almost exactly two years ago.

We originally thought it be interesting to hear what he has to say about the new park in his District, Bridge Columbia and how it felt to be the only council member who didn’t have an alternative plan for councilmanic redistricting.

Now that I’m home I found out that he was also on the losing side of the vote for the plan that the council has passed on to the exec. This is high loco politico drama for HoCo. We have a council appointed redistricting commission recommendation that nobody seemed to like except the Dem politico operatives. We have people in Ellicott City who don’t want to be a part of a Columbia district and people in Columbia who don’t want to be part of an Ellicott City district. As if that wasn’t enough fun, the plan that the council passed has pissed off the people in Elkridge, not this is all that unusual lately.

The stuff going on in Annapolis is pretty scary too. The budget that the state Senate is about to approve has some heavy baggage. According to this story by Aaron C. Davis and Michael Alison Chandler in The Washington Post, it “is an even more fundamental change to the way government works in Maryland.”

“The state would assume authority to seize county tax revenue and to hand it directly to school boards to ensure that counties maintain what areamong the nation’s highest levels of per-pupil spending.”

I’ve got some reading to do.