Spring Stuff

The only thing I dislike about spring is that many of the acts of natures great color show end too soon. A week or sometimes just days can dramatically change the scene from brilliant color to something greenish. Catching the really big shows like the cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin is often a matter of luck and timing.

Columbia looks good. There are flowering trees all over the town and some like the bradford pear have already done their spring thing. Others like the kwanzan cherry are just getting amped up. 

 Life is returning to the lakefront too. Earlier today I walked by Clyde’s. The new façade is up and new employees are being trained. Paul Kraft, the general manager, told me that they hope to reopen by next Monday. He let me peek in the door and, from what little I could see, I was impressed. New ceiling, new lighting, new back bar, new carpet, you get the picture. It’s familiar yet different. “That’s what $5 million will get you,” he quipped.

I understand it also paid for a kicking new kitchen and bathrooms.

There will be announcement soon about who will takeover the former Red Pearl space. I've sworn not to reveal what I know even though it’s killing me. I’ll just say that I’m excited.

You can find more pictures here that I snapped around town while goofing off a little this afternoon.

Secret Garden

We've driven by it numerous times but never stopped. That in and of itself is not so unusual, it’s an old graveyard after all and neither of us knows anyone interred there. I suppose it was a combination of curiosity, a warm Saturday, and the profusion of daffodils that spurred Mama Wordbones to suggest we take a closer look at Whipps Garden Cemetery on St. Johns Lane in Ellicott City.

I’m glad we did. True to its name, Whipps is as much a garden as it is a 180 year old cemetery. Carefully overseen by the Friends of The Whipps Cemetery and Memorial Gardens and community volunteers, the one acre “heritage-garden park” is both historic and botanic. It features a native plants “typical of those grown in Maryland gardens of the 1800’s.”

You can find more pictures of Whipps Garden Cemetery here.

Black Mulch

Home Depot had a big sale on mulch this weekend and we took advantage of the opportunity to load up. We weren't the only ones. In the Ellicott City store on Saturday the staff in the garden center struggled to keep up with the demand, particularly for the black stuff.

I watched a steady stream of customers empty out a pallet load of the stuff within fifteen minutes. During that time the brown and red mulch bags were hardly touched.

Brown mulch is out. In HoCo, black mulch is suburban yard chic. 

Not Yet

“How were the cherry blossoms?”

“We didn't go to the Tidal Basin.”

“You were on the Mall weren't you?”

“Yeah, but I don’t recall seeing any cherry blossoms.”

“Then they weren't blooming.”

Mama Wordbones was right as usual, particularly when it comes to the ways of nature. I went back and checked my camera. I had taken the typical tourist pictures. Standing in the middle of America’s front lawn I took one shot towards the capital and one towards the monument. Bing. Bang. Boom.

If you look closely you can see the beginnings of color. I wasn't looking closely. It was cold.

Peanut and I took a day trip to the National Museum of American History , my choice not hers. Someone is not doing well in US History and I was hoping for some sort of inspiration. I don’t think it took. Hard to tell though, teenagers are notoriously hard to read.

On the ride home I heard on the radio that peak bud time has now moved back to this Saturday, two days above the average.

We're planning on going back on Sunday, with the bikes. It would be nice if we didn't have to wear ski hats and gloves.

Buzzard Rock March 2013

One of our favorite loco trails is the hike up to Buzzard Rock from Bloede Dam in the Patapsco State Park. Yesterday, at the trail head on Ilchester Road, the road was lined with cars as locos streamed into the park for the best day of the weekend.

It was a perfect day for a hike, not too cold, not hot.

Buzzards Rock sits atop the Simpkins Mill side of the Ilchester Tunnel and rewards your climb with a nice view of the valley below. It’s also a hangout. Though I don’t particularly care for those who introduce spray paint into an otherwise bucolic setting, I do find some of the art to be oddly compelling.

Perhaps of more concern was the number of people we could see milling about on the CSX rail tracks below. I immediately thought of this video my friend Mickey Gomez shared on Facebook earlier this week.

Train tracks are dangerous places.

On the descent to Bloede Dam, a cyclist passed us on the way up and greeted me by name, breathing hard as he attacked the steep incline. I acknowledged the greeting but I have to admit I did not immediately recognize him in the brief moment we passed. I felt bad but he was wearing a helmet and I was sporting non prescription sunglasses, a bad combination for me on a good day. As I continued down the trail trying to figure out who I just said hello to I turned back and saw him taking a break next to a tree. It’s a very long hill and he was about three quarters of the way up. Who was that guy?

Arriving back at the Grist Mill Trail was like merging on to a pedestrian freeway. Runners, bikers, dog walkers, and all walks in between were out in large numbers getting a much needed dose of medicine for cabin fever.

You can find more Buzzard Rock Trail pictures here. 

Paring the Pear

We took the best day of the weekend to attend to a couple of spring arbor maintenance items, paring the Bradford Pear and shoring up a cypress.

As I've posted before, the Bradford pear is both a blessing and a curse of the suburbs. On the one hand the mass proliferation of the tree provides an early spring splash of white blooms that cuts through the muted background of winter. On the other hand, they are brittle, prone to splitting.

We’re trying to be proactive in this regard. Since planting the tree six years ago, this is the second time we've given it a serious early spring trim. Mama Wordbones says we need to do this before the forsythia bloom. We may be too late already. The forsythia branches right next to the transformer box have already bloomed…

Anyway, we removed branches that cross over other branches and other potential trouble spots. She also snipped off all the suckers she could reach while I held the ladder. 

This will likely be the last trim, for us anyway. Bradford’s grow fast and trimming will soon be out of the hands of amateurs.

During the Frankenstorm, one of our Leland Cypress trees was partially uprooted and leaning towards our neighbors yard. Instead of calling in professionals, we opted to try and fix it ourselves, using a stake and come along rig to bring the tree back upright. We left everything in place through the winter in hopes that it would settle in and reestablish its roots.

It worked too well. The tree is now leaning the other way so we re-positioned and reset the rig and I now have scratches on my nose from wrestling with a fifteen foot evergreen.

Short Walk on a Short Trail

A couple of weeks ago, while driving through Catonsville, I spotted this sign for the Short Line Trail. Yesterday, Mama Wordbones and I decided to check it out.

I lived in this neighborhood until I was around ten years old. I can recall when the trains still used this line, servicing what once was the John S. Wilson Lumber Company on Frederick Road (now Bill’s Music House). The line was abandoned in the early seventies and since 1998 Catonsville Rails to Trails has labored to restore the former right of way to a 2.5 mile rail trail.

We picked the wrong spot to check it out. After walking only a short distance we discovered that the rail tunnel that used to run under Bloomsbury Avenue no longer existed. The most complete part of the trail is found further down the line at Maiden Choice Lane. The section we explored is still a work in progress.

Standing above the trail on Bloomsbury Avenue we decided to go and explore the Lurman Woodland Theater instead. This outdoor theater, tucked in the woods adjacent to Catonsville High School, hosts free music concerts on Saturday and Sunday evenings during the summer months. Yesterday it played host to an Easter egg hunt sponsored by the Catonsville Men’s Civic Association.

Bright Idea

I've actually met a few people who've told me they are beginning to hoard incandescent light bulbs in face the impending ban on sales.

I happen to believe that is a very stupid idea, akin to hoarding buggy whips.

I admit that I once briefly flirted with this notion, particularly considering the fact that the economics of a simple light bulb were changing, dramatically. I can buy an incandescent light bulb for fifty cents. The cheapest LED bulb runs about ten bucks, a ninety five percent increase.

That ten dollar price is actually the good news. Until recently, most LED bulbs sold in the thirty dollar range...some still do, for that and more. A 75 watt LED, for example, will run you somewhere from the mid thirties to the mid forties.

Think of it as a long term investment. In this column in The New York Times, David Pogue writes that “LEDs last about 25 times as long as incandescents and three times as long as CFLs; we’re talking maybe 25,000 hours of light. Install one today, and you may not own your house, or even live, long enough to see it burn out.”

“Yet despite all of these advantages, few people install LED lights. They never get farther than: “$30 for a light bulb? That’s nuts!” Never mind that they will save about $200 in replacement bulbs and electricity over 25 years. (More, if your electric company offers LED-lighting rebates.)”

A LED start up is even making smart light bulbs, opening a new frontier in home lighting...

Yet I imagine that some will still build stockpiles of the incandescents. In a reader’s response column to his first piece, David was asked if it was really necessary “to plug a light bulb into the Internet,” to which he responded “I understand that both incandescent light bulbs and candles are still available at many fine housewares retailers.”

Where’s the Lamb?

This morning a colleague commented on winter’s stubborn refusal to exit the scene by wondering “Where’s the lamb?”

The age old adage about March, “in like a lion out like a lamb,” doesn't seem to be holding true this year. According to this report in The Sun, “The National Weather Service is forecasting a 30 percent chance of rain and snow Sunday night and a 50 percent chance of rain and snow on Monday.”

That’s lion behavior.

Since I first stepped out the door in the the morning chill today, I've had this Little Feat song playing in the back of my head.

Electric Stuff

Yesterday, as I was driving out of my neighborhood on the way to work, I noted that a phalanx of hard hatter workers had descended upon my street along with an assortment of “Grid One” vehicles.

Later, when I returned home, there was a note on my door telling us that we now had a new smart meter. It also suggested that we might want to check our clocks since the power was off briefly during the installation.

We’re pretty ambivalent about this meter switch but there are others who suspect BGE of nefarious designs. For those folks the utility offers the option of opting out of the program.

They are scheduled to be finished in HoCo by August.

And keeping on with this electric theme, later in the afternoon I spotted this Chevy Volt in Oella. It is the first time I've seen one of these in the wild.

Nice looking car!

Thawing Out

I suffer no illusions that winter is finished with us just yet. March can be a fickle lover. One day the sun shines and the mercury flirts with sixty only to turn around and find the next day drearily overcast, back in thirties. It’s springs' big tease month.

Today is one of those teaser days. The garden centers are hopping and cars are being washed.

It really wasn't a bad winter. For the second year in a row we've escaped the big snow event. I like a big snow storm but only for the first few days. After a week the beauty of a fresh blanket of white snow is replaced by cinder encrusted mounds of melting snow along the roads.

Hopefully we’re done now. Tomorrow morning we’ll jump our clocks ahead an hour and edge one step closer to the warmer days ahead.

I’m ready.... apparently so are the daffodils.

Collateral Damage

This afternoon the only sound to break the afternoon silence was an aluminum soda can being blown down the street. I was a little surprised that such a small object could be so noisy.

The clanging can provided the perfect backdrop for all the other garbage that was flying around the neighborhood. It seems that the majority of my neighbors did not get the memo that our faux snow day resulted in a slide day scenario for trash pick up. Today was our normal recycling day. Tomorrow is our slide day.

The combination of wind gusts up to 30 mph and stuffed blue bins resulted in an accumulation of trash on lawns that rivaled Wednesdays’ snowfall amounts! 

Parking and Adaptive Reuse

Two buildings in Columbia are adapting to new uses and dealing with resultant parking challenges. On Dobbin Road, the building that now houses the Frisco Grille and two other retail uses was originally constructed for industrial use. In downtown Columbia, a former office building is being converted to retail. They both have different parking lot issues to deal with as a result of these changes.

On Dobbin Road, the owners of 6695 Dobbin Road want to reduce the setback from Dobbin from the existing 25 feet to the county minimum of 7 feet in order to accommodate 20 new parking spaces. Anyone who has ever tried to get a parking space at the Frisco Grille can attest to the need for more spaces. This is indicative of the changing nature of the Dobbin Road corridor, originally conceived for more industrial type uses which generally required fewer parking spaces.

In downtown Columbia, Howard Hughes is seeking to reduce the number of parking spaces at the former Rouse Company headquarters building. As part of the buildings redevelopment the developer proposes to reconfigure the existing parking lots which will result in a reduction of 98 parking spaces. Part of this reduction is due to mitigation of storm water runoff. The reconfigured parking lot will treat “50% of the existing impervious area for water quality within Micro-bioretention facilities within the parking islands.”

This is a huge improvement over existing conditions that offers no storm water mitigation.

In both instances the parking ratios will remain in compliance with county zoning regulations for the new uses.

The Perils of Predictions

Pity the poor weatherman. That’s the gist of this article by Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post today. Joel defends the masters of meteorology by stating simply that “Snow is hard.”

“Snow exposes failure. If the weatherperson botches a rainfall prediction, no one notices, because it’s hard for an ordinary person to judge rainfall totals, and the storm sewers gobble up the excess. But someone can detect a bad snow forecast — too much snow, or too little — just by looking out the window.”

He has a point. There is snow on the ground today, but not everywhere. So far at least, the Snowquester has just turned out to be a cold wet mess. The best part is that traffic coming into work this morning was light. The worst part is that the kids are home and the libraries are closed.

The Bag Tax is a Good Tax

If the General Assembly passes House Bill 1086, Maryland would become the first state in the country to impose a statewide tax on plastic bags. This is one tax I can get behind. According this editorial in The Washington Post today bag taxes “are effective at cutting litter and popularizing the reuse of bags; and industry arguments against such measures are nonsense.”

“The evidence from the District and Montgomery is overwhelming. In the District, plastic bag use has dropped by at least half since the 5-cent tax went into effect in 2010. In Montgomery, the drop was significant — about a third — though not as sharp as in the District; however, the county collected more than $2 million from the tax last year, which will help it pay to remove litter that includes plastic bags.”

I've been a staunch proponent of reusable bags ever since I listened to Jean-Michael Cousteau at the Baltimore Speaker Series a little over three years ago. Since then I've amassed quite a collection.

Plastic bags are a public nuisance. A neighbor once quipped that we should make them the state flag since you can see them flutter in the wind almost everywhere.

“Industry lobbyists even argue that plastic bags don’t contribute much to litter, as if the visible evidence all around — bags in tree limbs, bags blowing down the street, bags clogging sewer drains — is invented. A study by the Maryland Department of the Environment last year confirmed their harmful effects.”

HoCo Delegates Guy Guzzone and Liz Bobo are signed on as sponsors of the bill making this one of those rare moments when I actually support Liz.

A Trail Less Traveled

The little taste of spring yesterday drove many locos outside for the first time in weeks. When we arrived at the trail head of the Grist Mill Trail on Ilchester Road around one o’clock, cars were parked in every available spot. After wedging our car into a space of questionable legality, we decided to explore the HoCo side of the river instead of taking the paved trail that lies in Baltimore County.

Actually, the opposite side is paved too, in places at least. Remnants of a former road provide an easy trek for the first leg. On the other hand this is not a path for cyclists.

Approaching Bloede Dam, things get a bit dicey as the road disappears and hikers must navigate a narrow path along the rivers edge. The recent wet weather made this portion of the trail a little muddy and a bit trickier to traverse.

 Bloede Dam, like other man-made dams on the Patapsco River is slated for removal though no date has been set for the work to begin. The cost is estimated to exceed $4 million and will include some attempt to preserve part of the dam on the Baltimore County side of the river.

On the other side of the dam it is smooth sailing on obstacle free  paved roadbed all the way down to the swinging bridge.

General Assembly Goes to Pot

A bill has been introduced in the House Delegates that would legalize marijuana in the Free State.  According to this story by Holly Nunn in The Gazette, Delegate Curt Anderson “introduced a bill that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Maryland, mirroring measures passed by referendum last year in Colorado and Washington.”

“The bill would allow Marylanders 21 and older to possess one ounce or less of marijuana, and to grow three or fewer plants in their homes. An excise tax of $50 per ounce would be collected by the state under the proposal.”

That being said, it is doubtful that the bill will get very far this year. I just don’t the General Assembly being ready to inhale...not just yet anyway.

Coffee Mugged

I no longer feel guilty about using disposable coffee cups. According to this story by Danielle Braff in Men’s Health, “Twenty percent of office mugs carry fecal bacteria, and 90 percent are covered in other germs…”

The problem of course is that most office mugs are regularly cleaned using a common sponge or scrub brush instead of a dishwasher. These low tech cleaning devices are veritable petri dishes of nasty stuff.

"Bring your mug home daily to be washed in the dishwasher, and make sure it goes through the dry cycle, which uses the hottest temperatures and zaps every last germ. At the very least, wash it with hot water, soap, and a paper towel. If it sits unwashed on your desk after being used, germs will start reproducing immediately—and bacterial colonies grow even when the cup contains nothing more than a coffee ring."

Eech!

Hike the Gorge

This spring the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) will allow hiking and jogging on designated trails at the Rocky Gorge and Tridelphia reservoirs for the first time. The 733 acre Rock Gorge and the 800 acre Tridelphia Reservoir help define HoCo’s southern border with Montgomery and Prince Georges counties. According to this story by Katherine Shaver in The Washington Post, the recreational season “also will be open 30 days longer, from March 15 to Nov. 30.”

You’ll have to pay for the privilege though. Hikers and joggers will need to purchase a Watershed Use Permit from the WSSC.  

 “Seasonal permits will increase to $70 from $60, and single-day permits will increase to $6 from $5. A new picnic fee will vary by the group’s size but will be $6 for up to five people. People 65 and over can still use the areas for free. The utility issued about 5,600 recreational permits last year.”

You can purchase permits online here.

Stand Up and Shout

When you get right down to it, the number of people who are actively involved in HoCo loco politics is relatively small in proportion to the population. Most villages in Columbia struggle to reach a simple quorum in their village elections. Even when there is a hotly contested issue such as growth tier legislation or intermodal terminals, it’s usually the same core of a hundred or so people who turn out to testify at public hearings, a pretty small number from a total population of almost three hundred thousand.

This could easily be interpreted as evidence that, for the most part, people are relatively happy with the way things are. This is one of the best places to live in the country after all.

The problem with this laissez-faire attitude is that the vocal minority can often dominate and frame debates, often twisting the facts. Fortunately in HoCo, when the issue is important enough, some folks in the bleachers stop sitting on their hands and let the players on the front lines know they are with them.

This is one of those times when those cheers need to be heard. The Columbia Association has stepped out their customary comfort zone to put forward a bold vision for Columbia’s central park, Symphony Woods. Instead of taking baby steps towards the future, they've laid out a vision that matches the dynamism that will soon take form all around the edges of the long dormant woods. The Inner Arbor plan embraces those changes, instead of turning its back on them.

Naturally, this dynamism is upsetting to some older residents who've grown accustomed to the status quo. They prefer the baby step approach because, in truth, they’d rather just leave things as they are. Opponents of CA’s plan argue that it’s too much too soon and too expensive.

I happen to think they are wrong as do several other people who care deeply about Columbia and Howard County but we need more people to let their voices be heard. It doesn't take much to show your support  either. Just watch this little one minute clip and if you like what you see, go to the website and add your name to the list and raise a cheer for the future of Columbia

That would be awesome.