Posted by David Carter-Tod on July 21st, 2010 — Posted in Blacksburg, Family
My kids and I did the Virginia Creeper Trail last weekend. It was absolutely fantastic. I cannot say enough how much fun and how gorgeous it was. This is despite the fact that we were completely drenched in a downpour.
A note on logistics
I called and made a reservation for bikes and a shuttle the day before. We drove to Damascus, VA (a little over 2 hours from Blacksburg), getting to the bike shop about 30 minutes before the shuttle left. This gave us time to get the bikes, buy rain ponchos, go to the bathroom and get our act together. We could have brought our own bikes and just paid for the shuttle. You can also drop off your own bikes at the top and just one of you get a ride up while the others wait. Last, but not least, you can ride up the trail if you wish. It’s a very, very gentle slope, but it’s 15-17 miles to the top, so I imagine you’d have to be in pretty good shape.
I didn’t realize until we got there, by the way, that there are a number of bike shops in Damascus. This is a good business for the town obviously. We rented at JC’s Outdoors and were happy with it, but the others looked fine too. Anyway, we all piled into the shuttle -about 12 people in all, with a trailer behind with the bikes on it-and were driven to the top of the trail. The ride up is on a very, very winding road and takes 20-30 minutes as I recall. Both kids were a bit queasy by the time we got there.
When we rode, the stretch from Whitetop to Green Cove was closed for repairs (funded by the ARRA by the way), so we started at Green Cove, meaning that the ride was 15 miles. It took 2 1/2 to 3 hours and to be honest we didn’t stop much.
The ride really was all downhill, but that’s not to say that it didn’t require any work. The slope is so gentle that you do have to pedal to keep going (the kids probably a bit more because they’re lighter, have less momentum and are on smaller bikes), and by the time we reached the end our hands were a little tired from braking and controlling the bikes. I saw a young (6-ish?) boy on the trail on a very small bike, and I would imagine that he would have been wiped out by the end (although the rain probably didn’t help). My daughters are 11 and 13 and were generally fine.
The default thing to do though is just gently pedal and freewheel down the trail. Check out the Youtube videos for a sense of what it’s like. Near the top especially, the trail is a little bit muddier and rockier. At the bottom, it was more tarmac as I recall (I preferred the top). Either way, do not wear clothes that you are fond of! You will get coal(?) dirt all over your clothes, especially if it rains. It’s probably a good idea to have a change of clothes waiting for you in your car at the bottom.
Most of the way the trail runs next to the river and you can stop and pull over in all kinds of places to relax, snack or just enjoy the water. There are numerous bridges that you cross. It’s just incredibly beautiful. There are places to camp if that’s your thing. About half-way down there are a couple of cafes/shops. We stopped at the first one we came to, which was more of small hut, although to be honest the one after that (across a small road bridge) looked like it had more going for it.
It started raining torrentially very soon into the ride when we did it, but the kids were great. They were having a lot of fun and continued to do so, despite being pretty soaked and filthy from the mud flung up by the bikes. They both had a real sense of accomplishment when we got to the bottom and my eldest wanted to turn around and do it again. I’m really proud of their attitude about the whole day.
That aside, I think the schedule they’ve created is a bit ridiculous. It’s compressed in order to align with the bus schedules. 4 minutes in between classes is probably an okay amount of time, but doesn’t allow for relaxing or socializing and it bothers me that the kids’ time is so regimented that they cannot allocate a logical amount of time like 5 minutes.
There’s virtually no time for lunch, and it sounds like that might be tricky to manage. I’m generally not very happy at how compressed their day is. It doesn’t seem like the learning of the children is the primary driver for the schedule. It’s about buses and giving teachers time to prepare for the next day.
The upgrades to the school sound good. They’re putting a lot of money into it. There will be A/C (except in the gym), which I was concerned about before the meeting. People were concerned about 8th graders having to go to the main building to use the bathroom–which could be an issue, particularly for girls. There was general concern about the safety of kids being outside, which felt overly fearful to me. They have two new safety officer positions to help cope with that though. Some were concerned about kids getting wet when it rains, but, really, it’s not like they’ll melt.
From the bussing perspective, the superintendent claimed that most kids will be traveling under an hour each way. It’s still a lot, but not as bad as I feared. One person asked about dropping kids off at the (current) BMS (aka new BHS) so they’d only have to ride from there, which seemed like a reasonable idea to me, but didn’t seem to go over well or just wasn’t understood. The logistics of bussing are tricky, mostly because HS and MS kids travel together and they cannot afford to bus them separately.
The meeting was interesting to my ears, because it generally felt like there were a number of assumptions which were unassailable because that was just how things are done/have always been done.
Overall I felt better afterwards than before though.
Posted by David Carter-Tod on October 30th, 2009 — Posted in Blacksburg
I really want to like Comcast, but they’re very incoherent. I’ve had cable/internet service with them for several years and just moved, so I’ve been interacting with their customer service quite a lot.
So a couple of things:
1. You call their customer service and I’d swear that within the first 20 seconds you hear about 5 different (automated) voices. It really gives you the feeling that you’re being shunted around.
2. I had a lot of connection problems yesterday (originally wrote this a month or so ago). I waited forever to get into a customer chat and failed, so I sent an email. Got an email response this morning telling me to call because they couldn’t solve the problem via email. About 10 minutes later I got an automated phone call to tell me that known problems in my area had been resolved. Oh and about 15 seconds after I sent the support email I got a call from someone verifying that my original install had gone well and all was fine. They were a bit unsure what to say when I told them I was having problems, which plainly didn’t fit with the script.
3. At the second try I did get the service hooked up at the new place, but the TV signal has been bad (no HD at all). The service guys told me that the line to my house would need replacing and it would be done on Monday. Nothing better by Friday so I call and there’s no record of that being scheduled or needed, so now a tech has to come to my house, probably to confirm the same issue that another tech already identified.
In essence this means that if you get all the features that you want with a Google site and the other integrated services (email, calendar, docs, etc), then you can use Google for all your hosting needs. Obviously if you want Wordpress or some custom component, it’s not going to meet your needs, but it will work for a lot of people, and it’s free (and obviously very reliable). It’s also got excellent documentation, ease of use and in the long-term a web site design contractor doesn’t have to worry so much about those endless requests for support or upgrades.
I’ve just more or less finished setting a friend’s business up like this and they couldn’t be happier. It’s a site for a rehabilitation service for pets.
Yards from million-dollar research enterprises, the grass is a deep, exuberant green, and I walked past a noisy stream on my way back home, past cows and horses grazing in rolling fields, birds yelling at each other rudely from tree to tree. I looked on rolling hills, not quite the downs of my youth, but reminiscent enough. The grass has been growing vigorously for the past few weeks, doing its best before the summer heat slows it down.
The sun shone in a sky with a few small clouds to break up the boredom and the wind was strong. It was a day and a time to not stop walking, when you didn’t want to, even when the wind blew a little harder than you really wished it would.
We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile. WE are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.
I took a bus to the meeting. I was the only one on it as there was another just in front. We passed perhaps fifty TV trucks. Everywhere I looked there were cameras. I was dropped off at the coliseum, which was full and closed, so I joined the line to get in the stadium. We waited, held up until the president was delivered to the building. I saw some people in Scientology t-shirts, but didn’t have enough in me to be angry at them.
I looked at the different news cameras, wondering where they were from, with their sticker slogans on their trucks, and wondered where they would be tomorrow, or next week.
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.
And then I found my way to wherever we felt was best. I sat in the bleachers looking straight down the fifty yard line, satisfying my inner symmetry. Many were sitting on the field. More were in the stands. Some found a lonely spot high, high in the stands. Some were in the executive boxes with nothing to see. Most sat quietly.
We waited.
We are Virginia Tech
We watched the big screen at one end. At first there was no sound, none except a groan that swept across the crowd when the silence began, and then it slowly came, and was barely audible. It was never great, but it didn’t need to be that good.
We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.
During the president’s speech, some people silently turned their backs. I wanted Nikki Giovanni to talk about children in Iraq, or Sudan, but she has more class than I do, and her silence, the not mentioning, was louder to me than anything. She could have. I knew it. I think everyone knew it, perhaps even the people in the front row.
We are Virginia Tech
Sitting in the stadium, we were part of it, but we were not. Watching on a TV screen. You know more about it all than I do. I haven’t watched TV in months. I know as much as anyone with an internet connection. But I was there. I hardly spoke to anyone, but I was there. A witness. A statement.
The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.
There is something intangible that connects us across continents, whether our mutual love for an institution, or a place, or people. We don’t all feel this loss the same way, but our fear during those moments, waiting for a phone call, is shared. We know. We’ve looked down that path, seen where it leads, and felt the relief of not taking the first step.
We are the Hokies
I waited all through for someone to say this. To say, that we are each other’s keeper. We share something, and we are stronger for it. We belong to each other and every word we say, every moment of compassion or kindness, counts. They matter.
It was the relief of being reminded of our shared strength. We are not to be spectators watching the performances of politicians. We must embrace and commit to support each other in a thousand small daily kindnesses.
We will prevail, we will prevail, we will prevail
We have a voice, and we shared it. We shouted it, because this is our grief, our loss. In the stadium, we started our own chant. After the polite applause inside the coliseum they had theirs.
We are Virginia Tech
And we left, when we were ready. And I walked home across parking lots, besides green fields with cows and horses and birds and squirrels and streams.
Posted by David Carter-Tod on September 19th, 2006 — Posted in Blacksburg, Family, Work
My kids’ elementary school has the principal blogging using blogger, and the school calendar maintained using Google Calendar. This makes it really easy to keep track of what’s going on at their school, using my customized Google Homepage. I’ve added the RSS feed for the principal’s blog to my home page, and the school events to the calendar widget. A bit of digging reveals that Google Calendar also supports RSS, so I could be reading both in any RSS reader.
Now, if only the teacher blogs (yes, there are those) had RSS feeds too, but they use Think.com sites instead.
It’s gratifying as, dare I say it, a pioneer in this stuff to see it becoming mainstream…eight years or so after it all got going!
I had never watched the show until tonight, but because my daughter made an appearance on it, I watched. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition this evening. My girl was one of the dancers who danced on the canvas to make the sunflower picture.
Posted by David Carter-Tod on January 24th, 2006 — Posted in Blacksburg
I really do not have time for this, but I am contemplating the occasional post on my adopted home town of Blacksburg, VA (my real home town is in England). I have looked very deeply, but I have not found much online, and few weblogs writing about the place, at least in any depth. That surprises me, given its long online history.
Just as an example, I have to say, that I do like the optician I use, Tech Optical, for the simple reason that the owner isn’t afraid to offer an opinion on how you look, and actually seems like she knows what she is talking about when it comes to face shape and glasses shape. To be honest, most of the time when I go into a glasses store, my eyes glaze over, and the help I get is pitiful. Lots of choices, and no idea where to start. I appreciate informed feedback, and it’s offered in a professional, friendly fashion.
The default thing to do though is just gently pedal and freewheel down the trail. Check out the Youtube videos for a sense of what it’s like. Near the top especially, the trail is a little bit muddier and rockier. At the bottom, it was more tarmac as I recall (I preferred the top). Either way, do not wear clothes that you are fond of! You will get coal(?) dirt all over your clothes, especially if it rains. It’s probably a good idea to have a change of clothes waiting for you in your car at the bottom. 