Mumbles & Squeaks Closing

Mumbles & Squeaks is not just a toy store with a great name, it’s a great toy store. For twenty some years Ed and Frank offered HoCo locos an alternative to big box and mall toy stores. Mumbles & Squeaks was like a curated exhibit of simple and unique toys. I don’t believe they carried anything electronic.

I refer to them in past tense because yesterday, on their Facebook page, Ed and Frank announced that they are closing up shop “to fulfill a long time dream of becoming beach bums in Florida.”

Can I come?

They will remain open until the end of the month as they sell off their inventory.

“We travel lite so we will only take our memories. Everything must go! Please come by wish us well! Share our news and our sale with all your friends so we don't miss anyone. You may forward this message to them.

Please come to Mumbles and Squeaks to share a story, a hug, a tear. As we said, this is bitter sweet. We won't say, "Goodbye." We would rather say, "We will save you a seat on the beach!"

Mumbles and Squeaks was one of those businesses that make Ellicott City unique. They will be missed.

Comedy is Hard

This weekend, the 2^nd annual Spring Celebration in Ellicott City featured four comedy acts in addition to a wide assortment of bands on three stages. I was able to catch partial performances of two of them; Michael Freidman at the Tiber Park stage and an act called SM Stefano Stratakis at the Wine Bin stage.

I came to the conclusion that grassroots loco comedy is hard. Just because someone tells you that you are funny doesn't necessarily mean that funniness translates into a successful stand up act. Both of these acts struggled to elicit any kind of audience reaction. As a few people pointed out, all successful comedians likely started out this way. I couldn't help but think that this is a very hard road to travel.

Other than the comedy acts, you’d have to call the Spring Celebration a big success. The weather was perfect and the crowds turned out. Dave Carney told me that the ECBA is working on a summer festival too, most likely to occur in mid July.

You can see additional pictures of Saturdays’ event here.

Spring Celebration 2013

This Saturday the Ellicott City Business Association will host their 2^nd Annual Spring Celebration in the historic district. Live entertainment, craft beers and Earth Day activities will be spread up and down Main Street from noon to 7 PM.

If Foot’s Forecast is right, the weather should be perfect. “Morning clouds will break to a fantastic afternoon! Skies will gradually become sunnier, with highs reaching generally the lower 60s.”

Perfect weather for festing!

More Food for Turf Valley

When I visited the new Turf Valley Town Square last weekend, I noticed two more restaurants were joining Facci and Petite Cellars in the new shopping center, a sports grill and Xitomate.

 It would be fun if one of these new watering holes dedicated a special drink to Marc Norman, the Turf Valley activist who fought hard to keep this shopping center from being built.

I’m thinking something with sour grapes would be fitting.

Fire Drill

When I stopped in the Old Mill Bakery and Café for coffee this morning they were debating whether to call 911. From their parking lot you could see the black smoke rising from the hill above Ellicott City.

“It’s just a fire department exercise,” I informed them.

“It would have been nice if someone had told us,” one of the clerks replied.

Actually I thought Howard County had done a pretty decent job getting the word out, at least in my neighborhood. Even before I drove past the action on Weavers Court I knew what was going on. Earlier in the week I received alerts from both my community email list and from Notify Me Howard.

“That figures,” she said, “we’re in Baltimore County and they don’t tell us anything.”

Such is life in a bordertown.

Later in the day I drove past the controlled burn again but this time the fires were out and the trainees were busy rolling up hoses and packing up their gear.

Andrew Metcalf with Patch reported from the scene.

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.

Beer Madness

In yet another play on the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament  The Washington Post has been running its 7^th annual Beer Madness, a blind tasting of 32 regional craft brews to determine a loco king of beers. A panel of nine has been “sipping, spitting and scribbling their way through 32 brews from the Chesapeake region.”

This is the first year the competition has focused solely on Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

“In previous years we've gone mass-market, global (in honor of the Olympics) and all-American. In this, the seventh annual Beer Madness, we decided to celebrate the local renaissance and showcase the best this region has to offer. All 32 entries come from breweries in the Chesapeake Bay area. We included some local brewpubs whose distribution doesn't stretch outside their front door, and a few small newcomers, such as Wild Wolf Brewing in Nellysford, Va., and Union Craft Brewing in Baltimore, that are just poking their noses into Washington and suburbs. But you can find all of these beers, on tap or in bottles or cans, within the confines of the Beltway.”

We are truly experiencing a beer renaissance in this country. In 1980 there were fewer than ninety breweries in the US. Today there are over 2,400, the highest number ever.

It’s beginning to get a little overwhelming. Earlier this week, To2C reader and occasional contributor Andy Liberman sent me a note about a new wine bar coming to Turf Valley. He wrote that it was purportedly backed by the folks at Perfect Pour in the Gateway Exchange shopping center. It had been some time since I was last in Perfect Pour so I decided to drop in and see what I could find out. While I didn't discover anything new about the Turf Valley venture, I was bowled over by the craft beer selection in the store. They have one of the most extensive offerings of craft beer in HoCo. There’s a pretty good chance that you will find most, if not all the 32 beers in the WAPO Beer Madness tournament in the store.

Andy later informed me that the name of the Turf Valley place is Petite Cellars. Yesterday I dropped by the new shopping center and saw that work was well underway. He also thinks the new place will be similar to Liquid Assets in Ocean City.

Pure Wine Gets a Patio

Last night when PJ Strain told me that he was adding a patio to his Pure Wine Café in Ellicott City my first thought was where. Sitting inside the small cafe I thought the place was boxed in on three sides, with no room in front for outside tables.

I was wrong. PJ walked me out front and showed me the empty lot next to his building that will soon provide outdoor seating for about twenty Pure Wine patrons. The patio is actually perched about ten feet above Main Street.

In addition to the patio, PJ is also adding another dining room, next to the existing bar area that will fill the space between the bar and the new patio.

Work is expected to be completed this spring.

Bonnie Branch Blockage

HoCo residents living in the Ellicott City Elkridge border area are acutely aware that Bonnie Branch Road has been closed to through traffic since mid February. As in most cases, you don’t really appreciate something until you can’t have it.

We won’t have our Bonnie back until sometime in July.

Big chunks of it are missing right now as the county tries to keep certain portions of the winding road from falling into its namesake water body. Yesterday, Mama Wordbones and I walked up to take a first hand look. It was a rare pleasure to walk along Bonnie Branch Road without having to watch for cars.

And now I can’t get that song out of my head.

St Patrick’s Day in Ellicott City…Mid Day Report

The real action was last night of course. Revelers were out in force in the pubs and restaurants in Ellicott City and apparently so were the HoCo Police. I say apparently because we opted take our St. Patrick's vigil to the Ale House Columbia last night instead. I received all my info on the historic district revelry second hand.

Today, however is St. Patrick’s Day and no matter what day of the week March 17^th falls on, it is a day to put on a bit of green and celebrate the impending arrival of spring. There is also the ACC basketball tournament going on which by itself would be enough of an excuse to sit in pub and enjoy a beer or two. Then again the wind sort of came out of that sail last night too.

Voices for Children hoped to get things going early today by promoting a pub crawl that began at 11:00 AM. Last night, as Mama Wordbones and I discussed this, we agreed that 11:00 AM on a Sunday morning is different than 11:00 AM on a Sunday. Sunday is a day to sleep late and get up slowly, even if it also happens to be St. Patrick’s Day. Consequently t-shirt traffic was a little off from last year when it fell on a Saturday.

The volunteers were out there though, selling t-shirts while quaffing hot chocolate. This also turned out to be one of those cold St. Patrick’s years but it didn't seem to daunt their spirits (one wonders what else was in that hot chocolate?)

Nathan, the River House Pizza Company guy, was out this morning too, selling his popular breakfast pizza. I haven’t tried that yet but the reviews I’m getting are all good. Truthfully, I need to be focusing more on granola and fresh fruit right now than breakfast pizza anyway.

Talk of beers and breakfast pizza were almost drowned out by the chatter about parking. Last Thursday public works crews from Baltimore County swept in and created a no parking zone in front of Wilkins Rogers Mill. This little stretch of non-metered  roadside parking, just over the bridge, had become popular with locos. Within hours the BC police had slapped $52.00 parking fines on several vehicles.

Mulligan’s Wall

After the retaining wall along Mulligan’s Hill Lane in Ellicott City collapsed during Tropical Storm Lee in 2011 the county erected a temporary wall to stabilize the site and keep Dohony Hall from tumbling down the hill. The temporary fix eliminated about seven parking spots in Parking Lot C.

They aren't coming back.

The replacement wall will have much the same footprint of the temporary one but at least it will look a lot better than current conditions.

Meanwhile on Route 40…

Since Safeway left in the summer of 2009, the once venerable Normandy Shopping Center has been a bit of a ghost town while the owners embarked on a four year process to redevelop the property. Next Tuesday night the developer will unveil their latest plans at public meeting in one of the vacant storefronts in the center.

It’s a major makeover that includes about 200 new apartments on a previously undeveloped parcel of land in the center.

Predictably, there are concerns from some neighbors, particularly those whose homes currently back up to the loading area of the former grocery store. It seems to me that they are actually getting an improvement over current conditions. Instead of facing the unfinished backside of an aging strip center, the new plan opens the space up with separate buildings and includes a new pedestrian plaza.

In any event, this development will be a huge improvement and will help reshape this portion of the highway that in recent years has more notably gained notoriety as the location of the only pornographic video store in HoCo.

The End of an Era

Watermont Pharmacy is closing. After serving the community for fifty two years, the family owned business has fallen victim to a changing health care marketplace.

I feel at least partially to blame. When we first moved to this Ellicott City neighborhood in 2006, I began getting my prescriptions filled at Watermont. By then the pharmacy was being run by Jodi (Dagold) Lare, the daughter of the original pharmacist, Donald Dagold. The pharmacy provided the kind of personal service you’d expect from local owners, including home delivery.

Over time however, as my health plan changed and I had to shoulder more of my own medication costs, I switched to an online pharmacy reducing my costs by a third. Undoubtedly this was true with other of their former customers as well.

The store reminded me of pharmacies I knew growing up, when they typically included a soda fountain. Though the soda jerks are now long gone, the counter and stools remained as reminders of another era.

The name Watermont was coined by combining the names of the crossroads where the store was located, Waterloo and Montgomery. 

Good Parker, Bad Parker

Last night I tried out the new Streetline parking system in Ellicott City for the first time. At 5:32 PM I pulled into a space in front of the Phoenix bar and dutifully noted the number of my space. When I then entered the number in the parking kiosk I received the message above.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by this. I had been under the impression that the new system would not allow unused time to stay on the meter after the car left the spot. It appears that this was a mistaken assumption.

That was the good news.

Around ten this morning, as I pulled into a space in front of the Little French Market, a freezing rain was falling. I thought this would be a perfect time to test out the Parker app on my smart phone allowing me to feed the meter in the comfort of my warm and dry car. I entered my space number along with my credit card but when it came time to finalize the transaction the app said I was paying for space 402 in Miami, Florida.

I wish. If I had been in Miami I wouldn't exactly need the warmth of my car. It appears that this little feature is not yet activated for Ellicott City.

I headed out in the rain to a nearby kiosk where I learned something else about the new system.

It doesn't take American Express.

I see a potential commercial here.

High Water

It was the storm with no name. Despite the fact that yesterdays weather event included 13 tornadoes in eight states, no one has given it a name, not yet anyway. It was certainly worthy of a name. According to this story by Becky Kellogg on The Weather Channel, over “a hundred homes and businesses in Laurel, Md. were evacuated Thursday afternoon after heavy rains prompted the opening of nearby dams. A commuter rail station in Laurel was also closed because of floodwaters.  Roads in Montgomery County, Md. are closed, and some are even buckling, due to the heavy rain and high water."Wind gusts up to 81 mph were clocked in southern New England early Thursday, including gusts over 60 mph at New York's LaGuardia Airport and Boston's Logan Airport," says weather.com Senior Meteorologist Jon Erdman.”

In HoCo it appears that Ellicott dodged the flood bullet this time around. The bridge crossing the Patapsco River was closed as a precaution but this morning the river was still running under the bridge instead of over it.

It was right at the deck though. Walking across from the Baltimore County side this morning, Dave Carney remarked that crossing over with the river so high made him feel a little nervous.

 It didn't seem to bother Chloe.

EC Parking System Debuts Next Week

It’s official. The black covers will finally come off of the new parking meter kiosks in Ellicott City. As of next Monday, February 4^th , parking in the historic district will cost a buck an hour on Main Street and Maryland Avenue and a half a buck an hour in the metered lots. Residents and visitors will also be able to use the Parker app for smart phones and tablets to locate available spaces.

Historic district residents have also been given a break from the county. They apply for a residential parking pass that will allow them to park free at any time in all the public parking lots and between the hours of 5 PM and 10 AM on Main Street. You can find residential permit info here.

Moshin Man

The Wine Bin in Ellicott City regularly offers tastings of their wines for customers. Usually the pours are handled by the staff but yesterday they had a celebrity bartender. Rick Moshin, owner of Moshin Vineyards, was on hand to pour samples and answer questions about his wines. He also shared a few stories that you won’t see on the labels or his website like the fact that his 2009 Pinot Noir, Lost Ranch is named for the grapes from a ranch that a friend lost in a divorce. For me, a good story often makes a good wine taste even better. I bought a bottle of Lost Ranch.

The Wine Bin was also rolling out its new growler service and like the wines, they were offering tastes of their growler beers too. Though I've become a fan of the craft beer movement, I’m not certain the growler thing will work for me. The smallest size is 32 ounces and once you open it, you better plan on finishing it. I enjoy having a glass or two of beer at home but with the higher alcohol craft beers, I tend to drink them much slower than the lighter brews. I am concerned that the beer in the growler will have become flat by the time I get to that second or third glass.

But I am the adventurous sort, particularly when it comes to adult libations, so I purchased a 32 ounce growler for six bucks and filled it with the Lagunitas IPA. Right now it is awaiting its debut in my naturally cooled garage.

Stay tuned.

Stretching the Zone

The speed cam van parked along Doncaster Road in Ellicott City seemed out of place. These vans were sold to the council as a deterrent to speeding in school zones yet there are no schools on Doncaster. Where this van was sitting, there aren't even sidewalks, on either side of the road.

There is a school within a half mile of where the vans location so I am assuming that this was the justification for the its placement. Still, this seems to be stretching the intent of the enabling legislation.  I wonder if there are any other locations in HoCo where the speed cam vans are taking liberty with school zones.

Java Walk

Yesterday, when the weather professionals told us to expect an unseasonably warm and sunny day today, I promised Mama Wordbones I’d take a respite from watching football to venture out for a hike.

By noon today it was clear that this would be another case of Maryland mistaken meteorological prognostication. The dreary day worked to dampen her enthusiasm for an outdoor activity.

It did not have the same effect on me. Count me among those who enjoy the ethereal beauty of days when the grey mist blankets the landscape.

“How about a walk for coffee?” I suggested. That seemed to be enough of an incentive to compensate for the lack of sunshine. We headed up the Trolley #9 Trail to the Breadery and a cup of Zeke's coffee.

It wasn't a long hike but at least it got us off the couch.

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.