Train Gardens

One of the holiday traditions that we enjoy is visiting the annual holiday train display at the Ellicott City fire station. Each year volunteers put up a slightly different version on 24 X 10 foot display inside the station which always includes a series of interactive buttons that the kids can’t seem to get enough of.

I enjoy the detail and creativity that the modelers put into this train garden. There is always something that catches my eye and makes me smile. This year was no exception.

There is also a train display in West Friendship. For the past three years the Four Counties Society of Model Railroaders has erected a huge display in the firehouse training room on the lower level. Yesterday we checked it out for the first time.

The FCSMR display is serious model railroading. It consists of a series of modules created by the different members and then linked together at the site. The painstaking detail of the various modules is pretty impressive.

Both displays are only up for a limited time. The Ellicott City train garden ends on New Years Day and the West Friendship display ends on January 6^th.

More Apple TV Blues

Last night I finally got around to giving Apple TV a movie rental test run. Peanut and I decided to watch a Christmas movie so earlier in the day we had perused the offerings in the iTunes store on my computer. We choose a film neither of us had ever seen, Christmas in the Clouds. After dinner we settled into the couch and switched on the Apple TV.

It failed.

We were greeted with a screen that said “Setting date and time.” I figured that this would only take a minute or so.

I figured wrong.

Fifteen minutes later, with the same message still on the screen, I got on the phone to Apple tech support. We tried manually setting the time, resetting the box and finally, a system restore. Fail, fail and fail.

After the system restore fail I called Apple back. I now had a case number. You know you have trouble when they give you a case number.

“Do you have an Apple router?”

Uh oh, I thought, here we go again, another example of Apple not playing well with others.

“No, it’s a Verizon router,” I replied.

“That’s the problem. Many of those non-Apple routers have a firewall that blocks the Apple TV signal. You’ll need to change some settings on the router and call Verizon. I’m sending you an email with instructions.”

“But wait a minute,” I protested, “it was working the other day.”

“Yeah,” he responded with a note of condensation, “but that doesn't mean anything. Sometimes it will work, other times it won’t. You’ll still need to change the router settings. In the meantime we can try unplugging both the router and the Apple TV and see if that will get it working for now.”

It worked. An hour and half later we were finally able to watch our movie.

They never tell you about this stuff in the Apple store.

Max’s Redneck Christmas

A couple weeks ago, driving through Catonsville on my way home, I spotted a house at the corner of Ridge Road and Rolling Road that had almost every square inch of yard covered with inflatable holiday stuff. It was so over the top it made me laugh out loud.

Today I took Peanut by to show her and we met the homeowner. “I call it Max’s Redneck Christmas,” he told us.

Max had just finished adding yet another inflatable holiday dog to the mix. “I picked it yesterday. It was marked down,” he explained.

He told us that he actually has five more that he still needs to put up.

“I put one at the front door because people kept knocking on my door to ask if they could take pictures.”

No need to ring the bell. Max doesn't care if you take pictures.

Santa Inc. Deconstructed

Santa Claus runs an operation that employs over 12 million people to carry out his annual Christmas sojourn. At least that is what Paul Tronsor and Mike Mangeot told Chana Joffe-Walt in this story on All Things Considered. Since Santa is notoriously mum on his means and methods, Chana consulted with a couple of logistics experts to try and figure out how he pulls it off . Paul works for FedEx and Mike works for UPS, two companies that know a thing or two about delivering packages.

Some of their conclusions…

67,100 elves are needed to calculate Santa’s route and monitor weather conditions...

40,000 elves to deal with customs issues...

152,000 elves to load the sleigh.

It must be some sleigh too.

If 760 million children each get a gift weighing one pound, it would take a sleigh the size of 295 Boeing 747 aircraft.

Laser Lights

Last New Years Eve we stumbled into the Holiday Light show at the Power Plant in downtown Baltimore. It was pretty impressive.

It’s even better this year. They've added fireworks.

The six minute shows goes off at regular intervals from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. The New Years Eve show will continue until 11:00 PM.

You can find the complete schedule here

Gangnam Christmas Lights

In the escalating battle for over the top Christmas displays, this home wins, hands down. Fortunately for the neighbors it was shut down after three days. 

Beating up the Customer

If you are one of those who find Christmas shopping to be a painful experience you may be comforted to know that your discomfort is by design. According to this article by Oliver Burkeman in The New York Times, “evidence suggests that the less comfortable you are during the seasonal shopping spree, the more money you’ll spend.”

“So stores crank up music, repeat the same songs, over and over again, pipe in smells, race shoppers around to far-flung points of purchase and clog their heads with confusing offers. All of which makes it more likely we’ll part more readily with more money.”

It works too. Yesterday I went into Hot Topic in The Mall to pick up a few things for Peanut (she loves the store!). Though the store was playing a familiar Rolling Stones song, it was blaring so loud that I found it to be annoying. That being said, I still made a purchase.

“Music played at high volumes, for example, may be irritating, but researchers from Penn State and the National University of Singapore concluded it was one of several factors that leads to overstimulation and “a momentary loss of self-control, thus enhancing the likelihood of impulse purchase.”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that online shopping is expected to increase by 12% over last year. Online shopping now makes up 6.3% of all retail sales and continues to increase year after year.

And, according to this story, 16% of those online shoppers are doing their holiday shopping in the bathroom. 

Apple TV Blues

It never fails. No matter how simple a device appears to be I will inevitably encounter a problem. Such was my experience with Apple TV this weekend.

I didn't really need Apple TV. I bought it because I thought it would be a fun gift for the house this Christmas. Buying a gift for the whole family to share is a tradition I inherited from my father when he sometimes would buy a gift that everyone could enjoy, at least theoretically. After one too many movie nights sidetracked by a malfunctioning FIOS box, I figured for a hundred bucks Apple TV would give us more options.  

So I plunked down the hundred bucks at the Apple store in The Mall for Apple TV.

“Do you need an HDMI cable?” the store associate inquired.

“No thanks, I already have that.” I was thinking that I already two HDMI cables. When I originally hooked up my HDTV, I discovered the HDMI cable I bought was too short so I went back out and bought a longer one. I decided to keep the shorter one, just in case.

I should have recognized that question as a technological red flag. I didn't and consequently I began to see why I might need yet another HDMI cable.

I was an early adapter with my HDTV. Six years ago, when we moved into our new home, I bought the biggest LCD TV available at the time. It was a 40 inch Sony Bravia and it cost me four grand. This was back before the great recession hit and many thought spending four grand on a TV was a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Today of course you can buy a bigger and better TV for about a quarter of that. Sigh.

Anyway, as I went to hook up my hockey puck sized Apple TV box to my TV I realized that it only had one HDMI port and that was being used by the FIOS box.

The solution of course was to add another piece of hardware to mix. A trip to the Best Buy store in Columbia resulted in the purchase of a Rocketfish 4-port HDMI Selector, and another HDMI cable, adding another hundred bucks to the cost of my hundred dollar Apple TV. The worst part, it includes yet another remote!

It never fails.

A Night of Madness

The crowds turned out for Midnight Madness in Ellicott City last night. By the time we arrived around 6:30 PM the parking lot up by the courthouse was already full. Though a light rain fell intermittently throughout the evening, it didn't put a damper on the festivities.

After grabbing dinner at the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company, we headed down Main Street to check out the scene. It wasn't long before we caught a whiff of something that smelled downright delicious. It was the La Pearle Waffles food truck which had commandeered a parking spot along a very narrow stretch of sidewalk. 

Further along we ran into Gunther Miller pedaling Choose Insanity bumper stickers. Gunther told me that sales were a bit off from previous years as the novelty has begun to wear off. To counter this he has diversified by adding HoCo magnets with turkey vultures to his product offerings.

High school madrigals are a traditional part of Midnight Madness and last night was no exception.

At the bottom of Main Street I spoke to a hot dog vendor who had commandeered another parking spot. Brendan told me that he was the guy behind LaLa’s ice cream parlor. The shop has been “coming soon” for almost a year now.

“It’s been a challenge trying to get open,” he told me. One of the problems he faced was the ceiling height in the space. It is two inches lower that the health department regulations require. He told me that he believes they've resolved that issue and are now on track for an April 2013 opening.

We finished up our Madness night with a wine sample at The Wine Bin. They were offering a red called Santa's Little Helper. It's the kind of wine you buy for the label, not what's in the bottle.

Record Sellout

It may have taken them 35 years to get there but last night the Columbia Orchestra had its first sellout performance at the 747 seat Rouse Theatre. They rocked the full house with a powerful performance of one of my all time favorite pieces,Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1. I can’t recall where or when I first heard it but it soon became a favorite. I've always been a fan of big piano music and Concerto No. 1 is big piano music. Last night Anne Kosclieny tore up the keys of a twelve foot concert grand as conductor Jason Love whipped the orchestra through its paces.

They rocked.

We almost missed it. Earlier in the week I had noted that the orchestra was a having a concert on Saturday night. We considered it a Saturday night option. I really didn't think it would be necessary to purchase tickets in advance. 

I was wrong. We were lucky to snag the last two seats together and only because someone turned them back in.

Is it just us or does anyone else find the seats in Rouse to be a little tight? 

Anyway...

Last Tuesday, as I was heading back to my office, I heard this story on All Things Considered, by Shankar Vedantam, about whether orchestras really need conductors 

“They seem important. After all, they're standing in the middle of the stage and waving their hands. But the musicians all have scores before them that tell them what to play. If you took the conductor away, could the orchestra manage on its own?”

It’s a great story. The bottom line is that they have now scientifically concluded that a conductor, particularly a good conductor, makes the music better.

Jason Love is a good conductor. They've even made a bobble head of him.

To cap the evening off the orchestra treated their record audience with Sleigh Bells.

Good stuff.

Five Thursdays

I am trying to adjust to the fact that Thanksgiving is only a week from today. By law, the holiday is always observed on the fourth Thursday of the month and this year November has five Thursdays. In my mind that makes Thanksgiving a week early.

I realize that it’s not. It’s been the fourth Thursday in November since 1941. The last time November had five Thursdays was 2007. I can’t recall if the holiday felt early that year, maybe that’s because I was too preoccupied with the poinsettia tree saga. Five years ago the poinsettia tree was removed from The Mall for the first time since 1972. It came back the following year and has returned every year since.

Anyway…

It’s now upon us. By Tuesday next week the wheels of commerce will have ground to a halt for just about everyone who isn't involved in the retail trades and, of course, those whose work knows no holiday.

The upside of the early holiday is that it provides a little breathing room between Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

Merry Christmas from Weather Station Wordbones

One of the items on my Christmas list was a weather station. Frankly, it was one of those things I think I just casually mentioned to Mama Wordbones once. I usually endeavor to keep evidence of my inner geek in check but every so often something slips out, such as my interest in a home weather station. 

As it happens it’s not just the political winds that interest me. There's still nothing like the real thing.

If I hadn’t received one this Christmas I likely would have bought my own home weather station before long. As it turns out, Mama Wordbones and my sister, GyspyPalace, succeeded in surprising me yesterday with a Weather Channel Professional Weather Center which I immediately opened and installed. The Winding Ross Weather Station is now active.

Right now it’s informed me that the pressure is dropping and wet weather is on the way. I’m in heaven.

Merry Christmas. 

Streets Unsafe for Gingerbread Men

Coming out of The Mall earlier this week I spotted this snarly beast. Gingerbread men and other fictional characters beware!

Even Santa Had to Wait In Line

The line at the Heavenly Ham store in Dorseys Search Village snaked out the door and along the sidewalk this afternoon. For many HoCo locos like me, getting a ham on December 23rd is just part of the holiday tradition. This ritual comes complete with its own unique hierarchy. Are you an A, B or I?

A's have people.

To their credit, the Heavenly Hamsters keep things moving pretty smoothly considering.The people around me were in good spirits too and that made the twenty minute wait go by rather painlessly. Instead of burying our heads in our collective smart phones, we engaged and shared a smile or two. I'm met a couple of new friends.

I was just thankful I didn’t get caught behind this guy. I can’t begin to imagine how long it would take to fill his order.

The Latest Rap on Wrapping.

I'm not very good at wrapping gifts. I can't tie a decent bow with a ribbon to save my soul and the art of neatly folding wrapping paper around gifts has largely escaped me. If it's an odd shape, I find myself reduced to wrapping tissue around it. Needless to say that gifts from me generally stand out under the tree. No need for a "from" label.

So it was that I was heartened by the latest research on gift wrapping. The bottom line is don't bother.

According to this report by Bob Moon (no not that Bob Moon) on Marketplace, "test subjects who got presents tied up in brown paper were actually happier than they were with flashy packaging. And you might just want to skip the wrapping altogether.”

This was the conclusion drawn by Nathan Novemsky, a marketing professor “at Yale University's Center for Customer Insights.”

It’s all about managing expectations.

“…you can imagine that -- especially as a gift that's wrapped sits under the Christmas tree for, you know, days or weeks, for example -- you start to imagine what's in there and you get pretty expectations. And when Christmas finally comes or the time comes to finally open that wrapping, you're imagining something great. Where as if I just say, "Here is something for you" and hand you something that you can immediately see, there's no chance for those expectations to creep up.”

Kind of like that little box that sort of looks like a jewelry box but ends up being a wine stopper.

“Oh, just what I wanted…”

Trading Places

Taping the podcast at The Mall two weeks before Christmas presents a special set of challenges, not the least of which is parking. Last year, when Katie Essing, the malls general manager was our guest just before Christmas, she suggested that the top level of the Maple garage always has spaces available. On Friday, as I leaving Nordstroms heading to our podcast set up, I passed Katie sitting at a table with our guest, Laura Neuman. Katie had just finished giving the new EDA chief a mall tour. After exchanging pleasantries, I made a crack about parking.

“Did you remember what I told you last year about the Maple garage,” she replied.

Indeed I did. While I appreciated the tip I told her that parking garages at malls during the holidays have their own special angst. It is not so much the availability of parking spaces as it the process of getting to them. Navigating three levels of parking means dealing with three levels of stopping and going as incoming shoppers block the flow while waiting for an outgoing shoppers to vacate a treasured close in space. The situation is further exacerbated when the outgoing shopper, oblivious to logjam, takes their time leaving, checking receipts, checking their phone and whatnot.

Needless to say I didn’t park in the Maple garage.

It is no secret around town that Laura Neuman and I did not get off to a very good start when we first met. On Friday we got past that and were able to have a congenial discussion about her background and her vision for the counties economic development efforts. 

My favorite part of the show however came at the end when Paul ranted about holiday gift baskets he’d received in his office.

After we wrapped up and I was heading to my car in the Nordstrom parking lot, Courtney Watson pulled up and rolled down her window.

“Are you leaving?” she asked with a distinctive tone of desperation in her voice.

We carefully choreographed a parking space swap even as other hungry space seekers hovered nearby.

You can listen to the latest edition of “and then there’s that…” here.

It’s Miller Time

Only in HoCo would five hundred people stand in the cold for a new library opening. Even Congressman Elijah Cummings commented on the surprisingly large turnout. The unexpected Saturday morning traffic on Frederick Road almost caused him to miss the ceremony.

I was one of those in the crowd. I had attended the groundbreaking for this building back in February of 2010 and so I naturally wanted be there when it opened. Mama Wordbones on the other hand opted to stay in bed on this overcast cold morning. She said she’d join me at the library after the opening stuff was over. As it turned out, there were so many people crowding inside at 10AM that I called her and told her not to come. We decided to take a walk around Centennial Lake instead and come back later when the crowds had thinned out a little.

The ceremony was nice though. A couple of students from Mt. Hebron High School played holiday music to warm the crowd up and the Boy Scouts presented the colors and led everyone in the pledge of allegiance. I did notice that during the pledge, Delegate Frank Turner did not remove his hat though he didn't seem to have a problem taking his hat off for the photo op ribbon cutting. I’m sorry but I’m old school when it comes to this. He should know better.

Anyway, after our lake walk we decided to drop by the annual holiday train garden at the Ellicott City Volunteer Fire Department. Visiting a train garden during the Christmas holiday has been a tradition for me as far back as I can remember and the garden in the firehouse on Montgomery Road is one of the best. The layout changes every year too so it never gets old. 

After that we finally made our way over the new Miller Branch library. At one o’clock it was still busy but by this time the crowds were much more manageable. It is really a nice facility. My favorite area is the periodicals section on the second floor. I was tempted to plop down on one of the chairs and read a magazine or two. Next time.

On our way out we ran into Valerie Gross in the lobby who was still beaming like a proud new parent. I asked her what was to become of the old library next door. The plan is for that building to house the library administrative offices which are currently split between the Central Branch and the East Columbia Branch. Doing this would also free up more program space in those two heavily used buildings.

Ringing That Bell

My buddy Tim Gallagher spent three hours ringing the bell standing next to a Salvation Army red kettle last Saturday. This is the third year in a row he has volunteered for bell ringing duty. The folks at Wells Fargo Mortgage in Columbia got him started and it has now become part of his holiday tradition. Kettle bell ringing is a big deal in this Wells Fargo office, with employee volunteers vying among themselves each year to be the top kettle producer.

Tim said he is pleasantly surprised at the generosity of HoCo folks. During his stint at the Centre Park Giant he saw more than a few fives and tens dropped in his bucket. “The bigger donors tend to be a bit older,” he said. He noticed others however, who seemed to go out of their way to avoid him.

He was also very complimentary of Giant. “More and more places won’t allow the kettles, so we really appreciate those that still do.”

Last year Giant received some criticism in the media when they limited the time that the bell ringers could spend in front of their stores. Earlier this year the grocer made a $75,000 donation to the local Salvation Army in honor of their 75^th year in business.

I happen to like the bell ringers and their red kettles. For me, those kettles with their sentinel bell ringers are as much a part of the holiday season as Santa Claus. They’ve been out on the street in towns across America every December since 1891. Nowadays they are found around the world as well. This year they received a Top Rated ranking from CharityWatch.

“Of the over five-hundred charities currently rated by CharityWatch, only a select number qualify for our listing of Top-Rated charities based on our rigorous analysis. Groups included on the Top-Rated list generally spend 75% or more of their budgets on programs, spend $25 or less to raise $100 in public support, do not hold excessive assets in reserve, and receive "open-book" status for disclosure of basic financial information and documents to CharityWatch.”

Tim said had a good time too and not just standing there ringing his bell. He also spent the afternoon interacting with strangers and helping the occasional shopper with their groceries. One lady he assisted was trying to manage four rotisserie chickens fresh out of the oven, in addition to her assortment of other grocery items.

“You must really their chicken,” he quipped as they loaded them into her car.

“Actually these aren’t for me,” she told him. “I’m giving them to some other less fortunate families today.” 

A buck in every kettle, a chicken in every pot...

Nothing Like The Real Thing

This year, more homes will have artificial Christmas trees than real trees. According to this story by Darryl Fears and Robert Samuels in The Washington Post, this Christmas, in homes across the country, it will be “50 million fake trees vs. 30 million fresh ones,…”

In our home it will be both. Seven years ago, when Mama Wordbones and I combined our households, the Christmas tree debate was an open issue. She had a fake tree and I was old school, nothing but the real thing for me. We were equally and emphatically committed to our positions so the only reasonable compromise was to have two trees.

Her reasoning on the superiority of fake trees is backed up by a study conducted by the American Christmas Tree Association which concluded that “fake trees have a lower carbon footprint — if consumers hold on to fake trees for six to 10 years — considering the energy it takes to chop, water and transport fresh trees annually.”

Real tree people have their own advocacy group, the National Christmas Tree Association. Of course, the NCTA has also studied the issue and found that purchases of real trees “encourages farmers to keep planting acres that absorb carbon dioxide from the air, soak up storm-water runoff full of nutrient and sediment pollution before it pours into waterways such as the Chesapeake Bay, and provide habitat for wildlife.”

They also refute the carbon footprint argument.

“The real trees also have a smaller carbon footprint than ones made with plastic and shipped mostly from factories in China, said Stephanie Flack, Potomac River Project director for the Nature Conservancy. “This time of year, while people are thinking of gifts they get from under the tree, they should be thinking about the gift from trees,” Flack said.”

For real tree sellers in HoCo, yesterday was Black Saturday, the busiest day of the season for real tree transactions. As we have for the past seven years, Peanut and I visited the Groundshog stand at the YMCA in Ellicott City to pick out our real tree. The man at the stand told us that he expected to sell somewhere around 650 trees this year, a little better than last year. Between his Catonsville location and Ellicott City, Ellicott City does more business.

For now, in HoCo at least, real trees seem to be holding their ground.

Seasonal Serenade

Last night, as we were enjoying our dinner at Clyde’s, a group of well dressed high school students approached our table and asked if they could sing us a song. After we agreed, they presented Mama Wordbones with a menu of song choices that included many holiday favorites like Silent Night and Winter Wonderland. She decided to go with a non holiday song and picked Java Jive instead.

That did a fantastic job. They were smiles all around.

The singers were the Wilde Lake High School Chamber Singers. They were working the tables to raise money for a spring trip to a choir gathering in Virginia Beach. I told them I was a Wildecat alum and tipped accordingly.

We watched as they worked their way from table to table and didn’t see anyone turn down the opportunity for a tableside serenade.