HR Bridge Tunnel Nightmare

Living in Virginia Beach and working in Hampton has never been easy, but today the commute was a real nightmare. In a classic scenario out of the VDOT playbook the HRBT was shut down about 6:30 am--just about the time I rolled on the highway at the Lynnhaven entrance ramp.  I saw the cryptic sign like everyone else..."construction tunnel blocked" and did my usual calculation.....an extra 20 minutes to the Monitor Merrimac or chance the HRBT and hope whatever "Road construction" meant would be over before I hit Ocean View.  Something told me to head to Portsmouth and up I 664. So that's what I did and about an hour later I rolled into Hampton after suffering through the beginnings of a massive traffic jam. At the office I checked out the news.... and swapped stories with the 3 of us who had left early enough to actually stay ahead of the swelling gridlock. It took hours for  the others to come in and everyone had his own tale of woe.

Now after many years of the HRBT commute I could tell you a few stories of my commute that would curl your hair....a crane toppling over, an axle breaking, accidents, crossing during a hurricane, and so on but today was a particular indignity. Why? Because it highlighted what those of us who commute know. The people in VDOT from the tow truck operators to the lightbulb changing crew to the muckety mucks who make the big decisions are incompetent. It is time to clean house and put in a new slate. Response time for accidents is slow, response to crisis is inadequate, decisions are made that are not from the modern world. People were driving through the water as late as 6:15 today, why?? The storm passed through in the late evening....

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CUPCAKE FLOSS

Just when you thought life couldn't get any better....

Available from Urban Outfitters

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Help Nora win $10,000

Looks like a local girl just might be able to make good with a little help from her friends in Hampton Roads. Our own Nora Firestone of Virginia Beach and her website "Thanking of you " are one of the top 8 finalists for the $10,000 prize at ideablob. Idea blob is an entrepreneur community where ideas are bandied about to see how they stand up to some gentle nudging. Thanking of You is a great idea about the value of positive action, gratitude, and paying it forward . If you want to give Nora a hand (She's currently in 7th place) then wander over to the website and check out Nora's pitch. If you like what you see then give her a thumbs up.  I know I did. Vote here.

HAVE A CHANCE TO WIN $10,000.

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American Nazis

Tonight at 9PM. National Geographic Channel

INSIDE: AMERICAN NAZIS

An inside look at the neo-nazi movement in the U.S. Including the Buford Furrow shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles. This program will air several times in the next week. After today's shooting at the Holocaust Museum important information on hate in its worst form.

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A Working Class Hero

Bob Flanagan’s Newest Book was Recently Released by Bottom Dog Press. Bob has a story in my collection, Bar Stories and he is also a widely successful author and poet. His Marine Corp book, Maggot is hard hitting and a best seller.

Here's a link to his website.

Check out the review:

      65 of Flanagan’s most notable poems 

      Professor Emeritus Robert Flanagan’s latest book of poetry, Reply to an Eviction Notice: Selected Poems, has been released by Bottom Dog Press, http://smithdocs.net. “It’s my big book of poems,” Flanagan says. “There are 65 selected poems written—and widely published—over a span of 40 years. Though I've written more fiction, poetry remains my first love. I love the music of words.”

      Some of the poems have been reworked, Flanagan says. “I keep them in boxes, and when I went through them to find what I wanted for this book, of course I rewrote them,” he says with a laugh. “I polished off some boxing poems and finished a long one about my mother’s death.”

      Flanagan characterizes himself as an aural poet in the Irish tradition. “In Ireland once I was helping some men build a stone fence. I wasn’t doing a very good job, so they asked the Yank to step off to the side. But they also asked me what I did, and when I said I wrote poetry, they said, ‘You’re a poet, man? What do you have by heart?’ I had none of my own work memorized, but I reeled off Yeats, Shakespeare, and Housman. I grew up on my father and uncles reciting Thomas Moore.  Poetry was not off in the academy it was part of daily life”

      The book is divided into five sections, each section headed by a line from one of the poems in that particular part of the book. “I write lyric poetry about inner city stuff,” Flanagan says, so the book contains poems such as “In Training, a Man Talks to Himself,” about a boxer, “which is in tercets—three-line stanzas like the three-minute rounds in boxing”; “Doc’s Got the Blues,” which Flanagan recommends reading aloud to hear the low-frequency “blue” vowels; “The Cricket at the BP Station in Eureka, Missouri”; and the title poem, which is a sonnet.

      When he’s not writing fiction or poetry, Flanagan immerses himself in the world of boxing. “I had a chance to do some readings that I had to turn down because they were at the time of the inductions to the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York,” Flanagan says. “I go almost every year, meet young boxers, and hang around with champions like Carmen Basilio and Larry Holmes.”

      Boxers and boxing are widely misunderstood, Flanagan says. “Growing up in the inner city, you go to the gym where a fatherly figure teaches you the craft of boxing and helps you learn to avoid street fights. And as someone once said, ‘No boy can hold a knife or a gun with boxing gloves on his hands.’”

      After the Hall of Fame ceremony, expect to see Flanagan doing bookstore readings and other appearances. “There’s one set up in Delaware at Beehive Books on Wednesday, July 15 at 7:15 PM,” he says.  July 31-August 1, he will be a special guest presenter at the Island Writers’ Retreat at Marblehead, Ohio.

      For more about Flanagan and his work, visit www.robertflanagan.com.

                                                      Gretchen Hirsch

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Can you identify these people?

Finally got the card out of that camera that I found awhile back.

It took awhile but here are some of the pictures.

More to come later

If anyone knows these people or recognizes the places leave me the info in the comment section.

I'd like to get the camera back to the owner.

And what is that giant cheese thingy??

THANKS.

.

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It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's a Refrigerator...

We all  heard that BIG noise on Sunday night.

 At my house we were loafing on the settee in the middle of an intense marathon of Law & Order re-runs when it KABOOMED outside. It happened somewhere between finding the dead body and Briscoe's deadpan line that ends the intro...

"What's that?" I asked Hubs.

"Ah, thunder?"

"I don't think so..."

"Could be."

"Doesn't thunder mean like a lot of booming? Not just one boom?"

Hubs gave me the modern cave man look. You know the one that means...

You're crazy if you think I'm leaving this cave to check it out....

I tried to say something else about how it might be something like an exploding airplane or a tree on the roof, but before I could act like Henny Penny with my sky is falling routine he had already turned up the volume on the remote in case it happened again.

Turns out the noise was the follow up to a spectacular light show that was visible over parts of Virginia.

 An article in the Virginian Pilot newspaper our local news source pegged the streaking lights and rattling booms as meteor fall out. The paper quoted a young jogger, Lindsey Hosek of the Great Neck area of Virginia Beach as saying that she saw something in the sky that was blue and orange and appeared to be the shape and size of a refrigerator.

 I wish it was my refrigerator. My old icebox is about twenty years old and I have been threatening to put it in orbit for about a decade. ....

 Although no refrigerators are actually reported to be in orbit there is a lot of space junk out there and some of it is quite big. This space junk turned out to belong to the Russians. According to a report on MSNBC the junk was actually scheduled to BOOM on Sunday night.

Just no one told anyone.

 Mystery flash traced to Russian space junk Expert says reports likely sparked by rocket stage re-entry, not meteor

by Andrea Thompson

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It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's a Refrigerator...

We all heard that BIG noise on Sunday night.

At my house we were loafing on the setee in the middle of an intense marathon of Law & Order re-runs when it KABOOMED outside. It happened somewhere between finding the dead body and Briscoe's deadpan line that ends the intro.

"What's that," I asked Hubs.

"Ah, thunder?"

"I don't think so..."

"Could be."

"Only one thunder? Doesn't thunder mean like a lot of booming."

Hubs gave me the modern cave man look. You know the one that means... You're crazy if you think I'm leaving this cave to check it out....

I tried to say something else about how it might be something  like an exploding airplane or a tree on the roof,  but he had already turned up the volume on the remote in case it happened again.

Turns out the noise was the follow up to a spectacular light show that was visible over parts of Virginia.

An article in the Pilot this morning pegged the streaking lights and rattling booms as meteor fall out. Tthe paper quoted jogger, Lindsey Hosek of the Great Neck area as saying that she something in the sky that  was blue in front and orange and appeared to be the shape and size of a refrigerator.

I wish it was my refrigerator. My old icebox is about twenty years old and I have been threatening to put it in orbit for about a decade.  Although no refrigerators are actually reported to be in orbit there is a lot of space junk out there.

This space junk turned out to belong to the Russians and according to a report on MSNBC was right on time for rentry---

by Andrea Thompson

I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington.

Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 on Sunday night, reporting that they heard a loud boom and saw a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news accounts.

The Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs, and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told Space.com.

He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday was slated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. ET Sunday.

The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi — the world's first two-time space passenger — to the International Space Station. The spacefliers arrived at the space station on Saturday

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What Not to Do When Your car is Towed in Virginia Beach

It was Sunday and my daughter was running in the Shamrock Marathon.

Hubs drove to the beach for the pick up and parked where he always parks every year -----.did I say every year? The Bank of America parking lot on Laskin Road. The bank is closed on Sundays and its near the finish line so it's always been a convenient spot to do the snatch and return. So at 9 am he popped in the crowded garage, set the brake, and was back in less than five minutes with our limping progeny.

But alas the old  "98 Rodeo was no where in sight.

BRRRINGGGGG!

TOWED!!

What!!!

I hustled over to the Oceanfront and the sad duo climbed in as I coasted into a space behind the Jewish Mother. The lot attendant on his plastic chair just waved us by. The car had been towed a few blocks away. We headed over to the towing company lot near the 2nd precinct.

That's where I learned:

Five things not to do  when your car is towed in Virginia Beach..

#1. Do not expect any one to be at the lot.

#2. Do not expect that they will allow you near your car until you have paid.

Even if you have valuables, an expensive bike, or just want to inspect your vehicle.

#3  Do not think that this isn't going to cost you big time.

#4   Do not expect that your city council cares.

In 2006 Virginia Beach upped the tow charge from $85 dollars to $125.

#5   Do not lose your temper and let it ruin your trip to Virginia Beach, Sunday afternoon, Shamrock Marathon.

YEAH RIGHT.

Here's how I feel about the whole towing business. I live here, I park here, and I've never been towed before.

I can see towing cars that are blocking fire hydrants, taking up legitimate business or hotel spaces, in handicapped spots, obstructing traffic and so on and so forth.

But pulling a car from a bank  parking lot on a Sunday morning (9am) during the Shamrock is totally insane.

And the lack of any kind of a real sign at that bank parking lot just plain stinks.

While we're at it.....

$125 dollars to haul  a car ten blocks is ROBBERY.

I can imagine how the tourists feel who get this kind of treatment.

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