The comments in the previous post got me started, and I realized that the subject deserves more than a small rant in the comments.

It’s a very strange thing, to be living in Morgantown these days. Those who live in big cities will probably have no clue about what I’m talking about, but I wonder if my experience is in many ways common to what many people in my grandmother’s generation experienced, as their small towns grew into these cities that they no longer recognized.

The first thing you have to realize is that WVU now has a student body as large–or maybe even larger–than the population of Morgantown when we moved here in 1972. And the population of the town itself has, at the very least, doubled since then.

This is all good and well, until you realize that Morgantown is still, at its heart, a small town, despite the fact we have four–no five–interstate exits, for two different interstates: I79 and I68. This leads to the problem of traffic.

Morgantown was never expected to get this large, and so the roads simply can’t handle the traffic. Too many small, narrow, winding roads. Too many multi-lane roads that bottleneck into two lane roads. Too many cars, not enough public transportation, and a climate and terrain that are unfriendly to walking and biking. Sidewalks that are in disrepair or non-existent, and aren’t cleared in bad weather. (Okay, WVU does an excellent job clearing their sidewalks, but WVU has three separate campuses, and you have to use city roads to get from one to the other.) Roads that are too narrow for bicycles and cars to use at the same time. (Especially with drivers who don’t follow speed limits in residential areas.)

Not to mention the fact that in Morgantown everything is uphill.

But of course even if you could walk, there’s hardly anywhere to live. The residential housing within the city limits continues to decline. Areas like Sunnyside and lower South Park–areas that are within walking distance of downtown–were ceded to the students years ago, and now most of the housing is owned by slumlords like McCoy 6. Family homes have been cut into apartments, and then allowed to fall into disrepair until they’re hardly fit for habitation.

Other neighborhoods–like mine–are on the margins, but it’s a battle that the family residences are losing. After all, who wants to live in a neighborhood full of trash, where loud parties last late into the night?

Who’s to blame? I don’t know. No one and everyone I suppose. After all, it would take a lot of money to widen the streets to alleviate traffic congestion. And there’s nothing you can do about the hills. And it’d take a lot of effort to drive out the slum lords. And even if you could, you’d probably have to raze Sunnyside and lower South Park to the ground, because most of those houses are simply in terrible condition after years of abuse and neglect.

Not that it can’t be done. I’ve seen what’s been happening in Baltimore, and the changes that have been made in the past few years are amazing, as slums are replaced with gorgeous new buildings–and homes. And Morgantown’s public transportation system has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years.

But it’s not yet enough.

What’s going to happen next? I don’t know. Things are going to keep getting harder until something is done. The question is simply how much harder are things going to have to get?

I hope not too much, because for all its faults, I love Morgantown. I love the mountains and I love living where even in the heart of town there are trees everywhere.

Because it is beautiful, this place I call home.

I think I am far more “Deep Space Nine” than the results show, but I’m certainly willing to accept Serenity.

And plug my brain directly into a computer? I am so there!
(more…)

And here’s a word that I dislike.

proselytize verb

1. To induce someone to convert to one’s own religious faith. 2. To induce someone to join one’s own political party or to espouse one’s doctrine.

What is most irksome, is when people who do proselytize, don’t see that as what they’re doing.

And if I haven’t mentioned it, I love my American Heritage Word-a-Day dictionary. Too bad I don’t care for their on-line dictionary.

Okay, I applied Michael’s php file to the front page, so now you can view a variety of flower pr0n.

At least until I change the front page again.

There’s nothing like letting the big boss know what a tremendous geek you are.

The big boss came down with some questions about screen captures, and it was easier to just have her log into her e-mail from my computer, because my computer has screen capture software and photo-editing software that I’m comfortable using.

We get the screen captures and she e-mails them to herself, at which point we hear Michael Dorn’s voice say, “Captain! Incoming message!”

I would really have thought that my e-mail alert would have not worked for her account.

First off, I am delighted that I finally got the new Corel Photo Paint. It only took six months, but I was finally able to uninstall my personal copy. I did a bit of playing around to familarize myself with the new software–no major changes, but things seem a lot easier. Hence, the new image on the main page.

Second note, the Washington Post apparently needs some basic anatomy lessons.

How inappropriate:

impervious \im-PER-vee-us\ adjective
1 *a : not allowing entrance or passage : impenetrable b : not
capable of being damaged or harmed
2 : not capable of being affected or disturbed

Think of all the bad words you know, and then riff on different variations.

Grrr. I have managed to destroyed my watch, and I have no clue how. I went to check the time before I took my lunch walk and the face is smashed.

Mind you, this watch has bene in my posession for a less than a year.

I’m hoping it’s still under warranty, although going to the mall was not what I originally had for my agenda for this evening.

I HATE not having a watch. It makes me feel naked.

So now I’m sitting at work all mad because I busted my watch AND because I’m feeling all naked.

(I would like to note, however, that I am not, in fact, naked. I am indeed wearing undergarments and pants and a shirt and a sweater and socks and boots. Just so you know.)

Star Trek Quiz ahoy!

(more…)

9:00 am Tuesday morning.

That’s Michael’s interview.

Keep your fingers crossed.

ADDENDUM the First:
Michael says he thinks the interview went well, and he liked the two women who interviewed him.

I love going through my referrer logs.

“pictures of salem massachusetts 1788 to 1791”
Because photography was a popular hobby back then

“are british people abel to get skin cancer from sunbeds”
No, the Queen protects the British from skin cancer

“burned down dairy queen in kentucky”
Is burning down Dairy Queen a popular sport in Kentucky?

“a real dinosaur is captured in new zeland”
I’m hoping this is in reference to a short story, otherwise the New Zeland government has some sort of Area 51 for dinosaurs

“is your washroom breeding bolsheviks? propaganda”
Bolshevicks in the washroom? And I thought that the people who didn’t wash their hands were bad

“graph of people getting liposuction”
That’s just really strange

“hard boiled donor egg blog”
Ummm…

Michael is baking bread, which I smelled when I got out of the shower.

My first thought was, Yum! However, my second thought was:

Fee Fie Fo Fum
I smell the blood of an Englishman
Be he live or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread

Which then led me to wonder: When you make bread from ground up bones, what do you use as leavening?

So finally some news on the job front. There was a message on the answering machine when we got home, asking Michael to call to set up an interview next week.

Finally! I was actually going to come home this evening and check to make sure the answering machine was working, since it had been three weeks and he hadn’t gotten anything. (And yes, our phone really does ring that infrequently that no one else had left any messages either.)

So, wish him luck for next week, and here’s to hoping that more of those calls come rolling in.

Learned something new today. Well, it was more of applying something I swiped from somewhere else, but still. (from here)

You will notice if you refresh this page (Ctrl + F5), the header image should change. So now you can see all the different headers I’ve used for this page. And hopefully it will motivate me to make some new ones, so some of the older headers come up less frequently.

I also had to go into my .htaccess file to keep stupid jerks from stealing my images and bandwidth. I had thought that I had set things up to stop hot linking, however, whatever was set up through my hosting service wasn’t working, so I had to go into the .htaccess file to do it. So that should be taken care of as well, however, if you have problems with images loading, please let me know asap. There is always a possibility that my fixes are actually breaks.

(And for those who care, there are actually two types of refreshes you can do. F5 or the refresh button refreshes the content, while Ctrl+F5 Refreshes from the source.)

ADDENDUM the First:
Michael rewrote the PHP file for me, so the images should load much faster now.