Month: March 2010

Low flying helicopters

Okay, maybe they are actually looking for or at something when they are hovering over my area at a low altitude. But dang it they are loud, and sometimes at different hours annoying.
The day after one of them whirlybirds has been flying overhead I check Airscene.com, hit ‘flight tracking’ then flights to try to find the annoying thing and see how low it was flying. Typically the police copters are UNK, but I know what they are and when they where here, I just can’t gauge how low they were flying. Wednesday, around 4pm, the skies were busy and UNKs flying below 1000 feet.

A snowball’s chance in Hell

Okay I’m back from vacation and I gather I and several other bloggers must have gotten email from the campaign of some guy named Richard Urban who is running for the at large seat on the council. Okay he’s a socially conservative white guy running as an independent. In this town. Snowball’s. Chance. In. Hell.

Last thought, never announce you’re going on vacation on blogs or social media sites. That’s almost asking for it. Even though I had an unemployed unpaid intern house sitting while I was gone, I figured it was best not to say anything.

Spring is loitering on the corner

You know good weather is around the corning when the boyz start hanging around the corner you prayed they had abandoned. Well, it’s better than the bad old days when they’d hang on the corner in bad weather, day and night. So they started hanging out Wednesday, and they’ve brought on new staff. There is one guy I recognize from days past, but the other guys? Ranges from ‘not sure’ to ‘he’s new’.
With vigilance, hopefully, it will prove to be an unprofitable corner. Problem is that we are a handful of blocks from heroin central, over by where the Truxton Circle used to be. But so far, during the hour or so I was watching them, and really didn’t see any cars stop. I wasn’t the only one watching, a few others thought it was nice enough to sit on their stoops, or fiddle in the yard. Mix that in with the odd dog walker, joggers and strollers, I don’t see how that’s an attractive corner for a drug buy.
Also I want to thank the 5D cops who showed up and made several passes by the corner, and ventured into the alley. Of course by then the boyz had wandered off, but it was good they showed up anyway.

Unrelated Announcement– Blogger issues. Blogger is going to discontinuing a service I use so I’ll need to migrate my blogs and I’m not sure what’s that going to look like. So blogging may be spotty towards the end of the month.

Quick Sale

This weekend a house near me got under contract, despite the price. Honestly, I thought $599K was too much, considering a house on the same block with a similar layout, but with a basement and a somewhat functional gas fireplace sold for about $150K less. Others who’d seen the interior of the higher priced home had said it was in move in condition and done very nicely. I saw the inside and admittedly couldn’t play the IKEA/Home Depot game, but I swear one of the interior paint colors was the same as my dining room’s. Ralph Lauren, Stony Mountain, NA15.
Well I gather the Real Estate market in the circle of Truxton, is healthy. That or someone really wants to live on our street. Maybe I’ll go with the second theory as Sunday was nice out, which meant the cute 5 and under set were out riding their bikes and razors. “Hey look, if you had kids they’d be playing with these kids by now.” And the people with dogs chatting with the neighbors doing things in their yards. For a while it was the best advertisement. A living brochure. A clean block (cleaned earlier that day by a neighbor) with happy children, a diverse (age & race) set of friendly looking adults being all frigging neighborly, smiling, laughing. That’s worth about $150K right there.
So putting your house on the market anytime soon? Somehow pick the nicest day for an open house and during the open house, convince your neighbors to make your block look like it’s fricking Sesame Street. Guaranteed sale.

Church gossip

I don’t really keep up with these things, so this may be last year’s news to some. But it doesn’t look like Metropolitan is going to be moving from Armstrong/CAPS school anytime soon. That church they are supposedly building in PG County to move to in order to accommodate their car-centric congregation, well that’s on hold. ‘Cause they broke. Or ‘bankrupt’, using the language of my source. I can’t find anything confirming the bankrupt charge.

Feh, PUDs and other complex development deals

I just rejected a SPAM comment for a old post (any post older than 14 days is moderated) about the Radio One deal. That was back in 2007. It is 2010. So ‘cuse me if I’m not as hopeful as some of you about the other projects proposed back in 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004…. You get the idea.
So far, in my mind, which means you’re welcomed to disagree (and I’ll just ignore you), anything requiring financing more complicated than a credit card form is something you shouldn’t hold your breath for. Yes, complex projects do get built. You know that National Harbor thing in PG built over a year or two ago? Yeah, they started that in the 1970s. I know where the paperwork for that is to prove it. So O Street Market may be done sometime in 2020 at this rate.
Yes, yes, I hear things are moving with O St. I will believe it when the machinery arrives, then a bunch of guys in hard hats are there 4-5 days a week for 3 or more months and something like framing. Real framing, not just stuff to keep the walls from falling down, forms. Don’t just adjust the fence and move the bricks around and call that progress.

A little advice to keep your iPhone from getting stolen

People, if you own an iPhone, you have a portable little device that sells for about $200 on EBay broken. Not jailbroken. Cracked screen broken. So imagine if a thief manages to grab it from you fully functional.
On the green line one afternoon, after work I noticed a young woman standing near the door, one hand on the handle of a suitcase burdened down with other bags and one hand, outstretched playing with her iPhone. Her body language just screamed, “Hey steal my iPhone!” She was conveniently near the door, for a quick getaway. The number of bags she had, made it unlikely that she’d go running after my imagined thief. And since everyone else on the train was in their own little worlds, the likelihood that someone would chase after this imagined thief, small. The distance she held it out from her body made it easy to knock it out from her hands.
She wasn’t the only young woman holding her precious iPhone a foot from her body, making it easy to grab. I saw another walking down 7th Street in Penn Quarter. She might as well have been holding it out another 6 inches further saying, “Here, here, take my phone.”
So my advice is when you’re out in public. Public being outside of your office, your dorm, house, your own private vehicle, hold your iPhone out no more than 6 inches from your body. Also it doesn’t matter what neighborhood you’re in because even Georgetown is experiencing iPhone theft.