Five things to wrap up last week:
Started pretty strong at NaNoWriMo, but tailed off towards the end of the week. Still, I got 9815 words in. Over five days, that’s an average of 1963 words/per day. At that clip, I’d finish in 25 days. So here’s to at least keeping up that clip. Actually, here’s to working more on my more serious projects this week.
Football was up and down over the weekend. My beloved City Knights beat the Poly Engineers in the City-Poly Game. Unfortunately, the Knights didn’t make the 3A South region playoffs. Terps went up to Piscataway and lost to the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. Not at all what I was expecting. Before the season, I’d had interest in going to this game. I had some crazy idea about going to the City-Poly game, then either driving or taking the train to the college game. Glad I didn’t. And the Ravens went down to Nashville and lost a close, winnable game. They fall to 4-5 at the bye. Hopefully they can figure something out. CBS’ Jason LaCanfora reported that former Ravens OC and Broncos HC, Gary Kubiak, is open to OC opportunities next season. Maybe they’ll call him up this season for some consulting work or something.
I had the occasion to go to the Halethorpe MARC station, for what was the first time, ever. I’ve been through there many times, as I used to commute to D.C. to work and I’ve taken Amtrak trains from D.C. to points north, many times as well. But I’d never actually been to the station until the other day. They really did a good job on the rebuild. It’s an actual station now. I remember it being a few bus shelters with a parking lot before (seemingly Maryland’s favorite way of building a train station until recently). And to get from the northbound platform to the southbound platform, you had to climb a long flight of steps, walk along a public street, then down another flight of steps. Now, there’s a proper walkway over the tracks. I used to feel for those folks on rainy and snowy days.
Saw on the news that Columbia, Maryland turned 50 this past week. There was a spot on the news, talking about the Columbia’s history, which touted Columbia’s diversity –even featuring an interview with an original Columbia resident, whose interracial marriage was accepted in Columbia in those days– but don’t let anybody talk seriously about bringing light rail out there. There’s diversity and then there’s diversity, or so I hear. Yet, these days you can get soul food out in one of the villages, which is more than I could say about the place when I was really ripping and running out near U.S. 29. So, Columbia’s definitely coming up in the world. It even has a Whole Foods on the lake and they’re starting to build sidewalks so they can become more urban, perhaps like Silver Spring.
Sent out another newsletter issue, finally. Got some positive feedback on it, too. Good times.